Online Safety Bill (Fourth sitting)

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate - 4th sitting
Thursday 26th May 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. Thank you all for joining us.

We will now hear oral evidence from Stephen Almond, the director of technology and innovation in the Information Commissioner’s Office. Mr Almond, thank you for coming. As I have introduced you, I am not going to ask you to introduce yourself, so we can go straight into the questions. I call the shadow Front-Bench spokesman.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Q 224 Thank you for coming to give evidence to us this afternoon, Mr Almond. There has been a lot of debate about the risk end-to-end encrypted platforms pose to online safety. What need is there to mitigate that risk in the Bill?

Stephen Almond: Let me start by saying that the ICO warmly welcomes the Bill and its mission to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. End-to-end encryption supports the security and privacy of online communication and keeps people safe online, but the same characteristics that create a private space for the public to communicate can also provide a safe harbour for more malicious actors, and there are valid concerns that encrypted channels may be creating spaces where children are at risk.

Our view is that the Bill has the balance right. All services in scope, whether encrypted or not, must assess the level of risk that they present and take proportionate action to address it. Moreover, where Ofcom considers it necessary and proportionate, it will have the power to issue technology notices to regulated services to require them to deal with child sexual abuse and exploitation material. We think this presents a proportionate way of addressing the risk that is present on encrypted channels.

It is worth saying that I would not favour provisions that sought to introduce some form of outright ban on encryption in a generalised way. It is vital that the online safety regime does not seek to trade off one sort of online safety risk for another. Instead, I urge those advancing more fundamentalist positions around privacy or safety to move towards the question of how we can incentivise companies to develop technological innovation that will enable the detection of harmful content without compromising privacy. It is one reason why the ICO has been very pleased to support the Government’s safety tech challenge, which has really sought to incentivise the development of technological innovation in this area. Really what we would like to see is progress in that space.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q On that point around technological advances and enabling people to access the internet, people have raised concerns that tech-savvy children will be able to use VPNs, Tor Browser and other tricks to easily circumnavigate the measures that will be in the Bill, especially around age verification and user identity. How do you respond to that, and how do you suggest we close those loopholes, if we can?

Stephen Almond: First and foremost, it is incredibly important that the Bill has the appropriate flexibility to enable Ofcom as the online safety regulator to be agile in responding to technological advances and novel threats in this area. I think the question of VPNs is ultimately going to be one that Ofcom and the regulator services themselves are going to have to work around. VPNs play an important role in supporting a variety of different functions, such as the security of communications, but ultimately it is going to be critical to make sure that services are able to carry out their duties. That is going to require some questions to be asked in this area.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q One final question from me. I would like to discuss your thoughts on transparency and how we can make social media companies like Meta be more transparent and open with their data, beyond the measures we currently have in the Bill. For instance, we could create statute to allow academics or researchers in to examine their data. Do you have any thoughts on how this can be incentivised?

Stephen Almond: Transparency is a key foundation of data protection law in and of itself. As the regulator in this space, I would say that there is a significant emphasis within the data protection regime on ensuring that companies are transparent about the processing of personal data that they undertake. We think that that provides proportionate safeguards in this space. I would not recommend an amendment to the Bill on this point, because I would be keen to avoid duplication or an overlap between the regimes, but it is critical; we want companies to be very clear about how people’s personal data is being processed. It is an area that we are going to continue to scrutinise.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

May I ask a supplementary to that before I come on to my main question?

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[The Chair]

Moving, I hope, seamlessly on, we are now going to hear oral evidence from Sanjay Bhandari, who is the chairman of Kick It Out, and—as the Committee agreed this morning—after Tuesday’s technical problems, if we do not have further technical problems, we are going to hear from Lynn Perry from Barnardo’s, again by Zoom. Is Lynn Perry on the line? [Interruption.] Lynn Perry is not on the line. We’ve got pictures; now all we need is Lynn Perry in the pictures.

I am afraid we must start, but if Lynn Perry is able to join, we will be delighted to hear from her. We have Mr Bhandari, so we will press on, because we are very short of time as it is. We hope that Lynn Perry will join us.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Good afternoon, Mr Bhandari; thank you for joining us. What response have you as a football charity seen from the social media companies to the abuse that has been suffered by our sports players online? We all saw the horrendous abuse that our football heroes suffered during the Euros last year. What has been the reaction of the social media companies when this has been raised? Why has it not been tackled?

Sanjay Bhandari: I think you would have to ask them why it has not been tackled. My perception of their reaction is that it has been a bit like the curate’s egg: it has been good in parts and bad in parts, and maybe like the original meaning of that allegory, it is a polite way of saying something is really terrible.

Before the abuse from the Euros, actually, we convened a football online hate working group with the social media companies. They have made some helpful interventions: when I gave evidence to the Joint Committee, I talked about wanting to have greater friction in the system, and they are certainly starting to do that with things like asking people, “Do you really want to send this?” before they post something. We understand that that is having some impact, but of course, it is against the backdrop of a growing number of trolls online. Also, we have had some experiences where we make a suggestion, around verification for instance, where we are introducing third-party companies to social media companies, and very often the response we get is different between London and California. London will say “maybe”, and California then says “no”. I have no reason to distrust the people we meet locally here, but I do not think they always have the power to actually help and respond. The short answer is that there are certainly good intentions from the people we meet locally and there is some action. However, the reality is that we still see quite a lot of content coming through.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you for that. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which we will hear from later this afternoon, has identified that, as well as a vast majority of abuse being directed on public profiles, it is also done via direct messaging, in private and sometimes on those smaller high-harm platforms. There are concerns raised by others that this would not be covered by the Bill. Do you have any thoughts on that and what would you like to see?

Sanjay Bhandari: I think we need to work that through. I am sorry that my colleagues from the Premier League and the Football Association could not be here today; I did speak to them earlier this week but unfortunately they have got some clashes. One thing we are talking about is how we tag this new framework to exist in content. We have a few hundred complaints that the Premier League investigates, and we have got a few thousand items that are proactively identified by Signify, working with us and the Professional Footballers’ Association. Our intention is to take that data and map it to the new framework and say, “Is this caught? What is caught by the new definition of harm? What is caught by priority illegal content? What is caught by the new communication offences, and what residue in that content might be harmful to adults?” We can then peg that dialogue to real-world content rather than theoretical debate. We know that a lot of complaints we receive are in relation to direct messaging, so we are going to do that exercise. It may take us a little bit of time, but we are going to do that.

[The Chair]

Lynn Perry is on the line, but we have lost her for the moment. I am afraid we are going to have to press on.

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[The Chair]

We will hear oral evidence first from Eva Hartshorn-Sanders, who is the head of policy at the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. We shall be joined in due course by Poppy Wood. Without further ado, I call the shadow Minister.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you for joining us this afternoon. I have quoted a lot of the stats that the Centre for Countering Digital Hate has produced on online abuse directed at individuals with protected characteristics. In the previous panel, I mentioned that the vast majority is done via direct messaging, sometimes through end-to-end encryption on platforms. What are your concerns about this issue in the Bill? Does the Bill adequately account for tackling that form of abuse?

Eva Hartshorn-Sanders: That is obviously an important area. The main mechanism to look at are the complaints pathways and ensuring that when reports are made, action is taken, and that that is included in risk assessments as well. In our “Hidden Hate” report, we found that 90% of misogynist abuse, which included quite serious sexual harassment and abuse, videos and death threats, was not acted on by Instagram, even when we used the current pathways for the complainant. This is an important area.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Part of the issue is that the regulated service providers have to rely heavily on the use of AI to facilitate monitoring and take down problematic content in order to comply with the Bill, but, as several stakeholders have said, algorithmic moderation is inadequate for recognising the nuance and subtleties, in order to actively and effectively take down the content. What more would you like to see in the Bill to counteract that issue?

Eva Hartshorn-Sanders: There has to be human intervention as part of that process as well. Whatever system is in place—the relationship between Ofcom and the provider is going to vary by platform and by search provider too, possibly—if you are making those sorts of decisions, you want to have it adequately resourced. That is what we are saying is not happening at the moment, partly because there is not yet the motivation or the incentives there for them to be doing any differently. They are doing the minimum; what they say they are going to do often comes out through press releases or policies, and then it is not followed through.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q You mentioned that there is not adequate transparency and openness on how these things work. What systems would you like to see the Bill put the place to ensure the transparency, independence and accountability of Ofcom, but also the transparency and openness of the tech companies and the platforms that we are seeking to regulate?

Eva Hartshorn-Sanders: I think there is a role for independent civil society, working with the regulator, to hold those companies to account and to be accessing that data in a way that can be used to show how they are performing against their responsibilities under the Bill. I know Poppy from Reset.tech will talk to this area a bit more. We have just had a global summit on online harms and misinformation. Part of the outcome of that was looking at a framework for how we evaluate global efforts at legislation and the transparency of algorithms and rules enforcement, and the economics that are driving online harms and misinformation. That is an essential part of ensuring that we are dealing with the problems.

[The Chair]

May I say, for the sake of the record, that we have now been joined by Poppy Wood, the UK director of Reset.tech? Ms Wood, you are not late; we were early. We are trying to make as much use as we can of the limited time. I started with the Opposition Front Bencher. If you have any questions for Poppy Wood, go ahead.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q I do—thank you, Sir Roger. I am not sure if you managed to hear any of that interaction, Poppy. Do you have any comments to make on those points before I move on?

Poppy Wood: I did not hear your first set of questions—I apologise.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

That is fine. I will just ask you what you think the impact is of the decision to remove misinformation and disinformation from the scope of the Bill, particularly in relation to state actors?

Poppy Wood: Thank you very much, and thank you for having me here today. There is a big question about how this Bill tackles co-ordinated state actors—co-ordinated campaigns of disinformation and misinformation. It is a real gap in the Bill. I know you have heard from Full Fact and other groups about how the Bill can be beefed up for mis- and disinformation. There is the advisory committee, but I think that is pretty weak, really. The Bill is sort of saying that disinformation is a question that we need to explore down the line, but we all know that it is a really live issue that needs to be tackled now.

First of all, I would make sure that civil society organisations are on that committee and that its report is brought forward in months, not years, but then I would say there is just a real gap about co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour, which is not referenced. We are seeing a lot of it live with everything that is going on with Russia and Ukraine, but it has been going on for years. I would certainly encourage the Government to think about how we account for some of the risks that the platforms promote around co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour, particularly with regard to disinformation and misinformation.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q We have heard a lot from other witnesses about the ability of Ofcom to regulate the smaller high-risk platforms. What is your view on that?

Poppy Wood: Absolutely, and I agree with what was said earlier, particularly by groups such as HOPE not hate and Antisemitism Policy Trust. There are a few ways to do this, I suppose. As we are saying, at the moment the small but high-risk platforms just are not really caught in the current categorisation of platforms. Of course, the categories are not even defined in the Bill; we know there are going to be categories, but we do not know what they will be.

I suppose there are different ways to do this. One is to go back to where this Bill started, which was not to have categories of companies at all but to have a proportionality regime, where depending on your size and your functionality you had to account for your risk profile, and it was not set by Ofcom or the Government. The problem of having very prescriptive categories—category 1, category 2A, category 2B—is, of course, that it becomes a race to the bottom in getting out of these regulations without having to comply with the most onerous ones, which of course are category 1.

There is also a real question about search. I do not know how they have wriggled out of this, but it was one of the biggest surprises in the latest version of the Bill that search had been given its own category without many obligations around adult harm. I think that really should be revisited. All the examples that were given earlier today are absolutely the sort of thing we should be worrying about. If someone can google a tractor in their workplace and end up looking at a dark part of the web, there is a problem with search, and I think we should be thinking about those sorts of things. Apologies for the example, but it is a really, really live one and it is a really good thing to think about how search promotes these kinds of content.

[Mrs Miller]

Q I want to touch on something we have not talked about a lot today, which is enforcement and the enforcement powers in the Bill. There are significant enforcement powers in the Bill, but do our two witnesses here which those enforcement powers are enough. Eva?

Eva Hartshorn-Sanders: Are you specifically asking about the takedown notices and the takedown powers?

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[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Good afternoon, both, and thank you for coming this afternoon. We have heard a lot about the journalistic content exemption. What is your view of the current measures in the Bill and their likely consequences?

Owen Meredith: You may be aware that we submitted evidence to the Joint Committee that did prelegislative scrutiny of the draft Bill, because we think that although the Government’s stated intention to have content from recognised news media publishers, who I represent, outside the scope of the Bill, we do not believe that the drafting, as it was and still is, achieves that. Ministers and the Secretary of State have confirmed, both in public appearances and on Second Reading, that they wish to table further amendments to achieve the aim that the Government have set out, which is to ensure that content from recognised news publishers is fully out of scope of the Bill. It needs to go further, but I understand that there will be amendments coming before you at some point to achieve that.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q What further would you like to see?

Owen Meredith: I would like to see a full exemption for recognised news publisher content.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q You would like to see a full exemption. Matt, do you have any thoughts on that?

Matt Rogerson: Yes. I would step back a bit and point to the evidence that a few of your witnesses gave today and Tuesday. I think Fair Vote gave evidence on this point. At the moment, our concern is that we do not know what the legal but harmful category of content that will be included in the Bill will look like. That is clearly going to be done after the event, through codes of practice. There is definitely a danger that news publisher content gets caught by the platforms imposing that. The reason for having a news publisher exemption is to enable users of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others to access the same news as they would via search. I agree with Owen’s point. I think the Government are going in the right direction with the exemption for broadcasters such as the BBC, The Times and The Guardian, but we would like to see it strengthened a bit to ensure a cast-iron protection.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Currently, is the definition of journalistic content used in the Bill clear, or do you find it ambiguous?

Matt Rogerson: I think it is quite difficult for platforms to interpret that. It is a relatively narrow version of what journalism is—it is narrower than the article 10 description of what journalism is. The legal definitions of journalism in the Official Secrets Act and the Information Commissioner’s Office journalism code are slightly more expansive and cover not just media organisations but acts of journalism. Gavin Millar has put together a paper for Index on Censorship, in which he talks about that potentially being a way to expand the definition slightly.

The challenge for the platforms is, first, that they have to take account of journalistic content, and there is not a firm view of what they should do with it. Secondly, defining what a piece of journalism or an act of journalism is takes a judge, generally with a lot of experience. Legal cases involving the media are heard through a specific bench of judges—the media and communications division—and they opine on what is and is not an act of journalism. There is a real challenge, which is that you are asking the platforms to—one assumes—use machine learning tools to start with to identify what is a potential act of journalism. Then an individual, whether they are based in California or, more likely, outsourced via an Accenture call centre, then determines within that whether it is an act of journalism and what to do with it. That does place quite a lot of responsibility on the platforms to do that. Again, I would come back to the fact that I think if the Bill was stripped back to focus on illegal content, rather than legal but harmful content, you would have less of these situations where there was concern that that sort of content was going to be caught.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q We have heard a lot of concern about disinformation by state actors purporting to be journalists and using that exemption, which could cause harm. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Matt Rogerson: Yes, a few. The first thing that is missing from the Bill is a focus on advertising. The reason we should focus on advertising is that that is why a lot of people get involved in misinformation. Ad networks at the moment are able to channel money to “unknown” sites in ways that mean that disinformation or misinformation is highly profitable. For example, a million dollars was spent via Google’s ad exchanges in the US; the second biggest recipient of that million dollars was “Unknown sites”—sites that do not categorise themselves as doing anything of any purpose. You can see how the online advertising market is channelling cash to the sort of sites that you are talking about.

In terms of state actors, and how they relate to the definition, the definition is set out quite broadly in the Bill, and it is more lengthy than the definition in the Crime and Courts Act 2013. On top of that definition, Ofcom would produce guidance, which is subject to a full and open public consultation, which would then work out how you are going to apply the definition in practice. Even once you have that guidance in place, there will be a period of case law developing where people will appeal to be inside of that exemption and people will be thrown out of that exemption. Between the platforms and Ofcom, you will get that iteration of case law developing. So I suppose I am slightly more confident that the exemption would work in practice and that Ofcom could find a workable way of making sure that bad actors do not make use of it.

[The Chair]

Mr Meredith, do you wish to add to that?

Owen Meredith: No, I would echo almost entirely what Matt has said on that. I know you are conscious of time.

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[The Chair]

One final quick question from the Opposition Front Bench.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Mr Rogerson, you mentioned that platforms and tech companies currently have a list of approved broadcasters that they are enabled to use, to ensure they have that content. Isn’t it true that one of those broadcasters was Russia Today, and it was only because Ofcom intervened to remove it from social media that it was taken down, but under the current provisions in this Bill, Ofcom would not be able to do that and Russia Today would be allowed to spread disinformation on social media platforms?

Matt Rogerson: On the Russia Today problem, I think Russia Today had a licence from Ofcom, so the platforms probably took their cue from the fact that Russia Today was beamed into British homes via Freeview. Once that changed, the position of having their content available on social media changed as well. Ultimately, if it was allowed to go via broadcast, if it had a broadcast licence, I would imagine that social media companies took that as meaning that it was a—

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q But under the new Bill, as journalistic content, it would be allowed to remain on those social media platforms.

Matt Rogerson: I think that would be subject to the guidance that Ofcom creates and the consultation on that guidance. I do not believe that Russia Today would be allowed under the definitions. If it is helpful, I could write to you to set out why.

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[The Chair]

We will now hear from Tim Fassam, the director of government relations and policy at PIMFA, the Personal Investment Management & Financial Advice Association, and from Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at Which? We will be joined by Martin Lewis, of MoneySavingExpert, in due course. Thank you to the witnesses for joining us. I call the Opposition Front Bench.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you for joining us this afternoon. As a constituency MP, I am sure I am not alone in saying that a vast amount of my casework comes from members of my community writing to me to say that they have been scammed online, that they have been subject to fraud and that they feel horrendous about it. They feel shame and they do not know what to do about it. It is the single biggest crime in the UK, with victims losing an estimated £2.3 billion. In your opinion, does the Bill go far enough to tackle that?

Rocio Concha: This Bill is very important in tackling fraud. It is very important for Which? We were very pleased when fraud was included to tackle the issue that you mentioned and also when paid-for advertising was included. It was a very important step, and it is a very good Bill, so we commend DCMS for producing it.

However, we have found some weakness in the Bill, and those can be solved with very simple amendments, which will have a big impact on the Bill in terms of achieving its objective. For example, at the moment in the Bill, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are not subject to the same duties in terms of protecting consumers from fraudulent advertising as social media platforms are. There is no reason for Google and Yahoo! to have weaker duties in the Bill, so we need to solve that.

The second area is booster content. Booster content is user-generated content, but it is also advertising. In the current definition of fraudulent advertising in the Bill, booster content is not covered. For example, if a criminal makes a Facebook page and starts publishing things about fake investments, and then he pays Facebook to boost that content in order to reach more people, the Bill, at the moment, does not cover that fraudulent advertising.

The last part is that, at the moment, the risk checks that platforms need to do for priority illegal content, the transparency reporting that they need to do to basically say, “We are finding this illegal content and this is what we are doing about it,” and the requirement to have a way for users to tell them about illegal content or complain about something that they are not doing to tackle this, only apply to priority illegal content. They do not apply to fraudulent advertising, but we think they need to.

Paid-for advertising is the most expensive way that criminals have to reach out to a lot of people. The good news, as I said before, is that this can be solved with very simple amendments to the Bill. We will send you suggestions for those amendments and, if we fix the problem, we think the Bill will really achieve its objective.

[The Chair]

One moment—I think we have been joined by Martin Lewis on audio. I hope you can hear us, Mr Lewis. You are not late; we started early. I will bring you in as soon as we have you on video, preferably, but otherwise on audio.

Tim Fassam: I would echo everything my colleague from Which? has said. The industry, consumer groups and the financial services regulators are largely in agreement. We were delighted to see fraudulent advertising and wider issues of economic crime included in the Bill when they were not in the initial draft. We would also support all the amendments that Which? are putting forward, especially the equality between search and social media.

Our members compiled a dossier of examples of fraudulent activity, and the overwhelming examples of fraudulent adverts were on search, rather than social media. We would also argue that search is potentially higher risk, because the act of searching is an indication that you may be ready to take action. If you are searching “invest my pension”, hopefully you will come across Martin’s site or one of our members’ sites, but if you come across a fraudulent advert in that moment, you are more likely to fall foul of it.

We would also highlight two other areas where we think the Bill needs further work. These are predominantly linked to the interaction between Ofcom, the police and the Financial Conduct Authority, because the definitions of fraudulent adverts and fraudulent behaviour are technical and complex. It is not reasonable to expect Ofcom to be able to ascertain whether an advert or piece of content is in breach of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000; that is the FCA’s day job. Is it fraud? That is Action Fraud’s and the police’s day job. We would therefore suggest that the Bill go as far as allowing the police and the FCA to direct Ofcom to have content removed, and creating an MOU that enables Ofcom to refer things to the FCA and the police for their expert analysis of whether it breaches those definitions of fraudulent adverts or fraudulent activity.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, both. You mentioned that search is a concern, especially because it is currently out of scope of the Bill in terms of this issue. Another issue is that when people do use search to look for a financial service or something that they wish to purchase, the cookies are remembered. The algorithms on social media platforms are then triggered to promote specific adverts to them as a result of that search history or things they have mentioned via voice control to their home help devices. That is a concern. Digital advertising that you see on third-party websites is also not within scope. That has been raised as well. Do you have any thoughts on those points?

Rocio Concha: Yes. Open-display advertising is not part of the Bill. That also needs to be tackled. I think the online advertising programme should be considered, to tackle this issue. I agree with you: this is a very important step in the right direction, and it will make a huge difference if we fix this small weakness in terms of the current scope. However, there are still areas out there that need to be tackled.

[The Chair]

Mr Lewis, I am living in hope that we may be able to see you soon—although that may be a forlorn hope. However, I am hoping that you can hear us. Do you want to come in and comment at all at this point? [Interruption.] Oh, we have got you on the screen. Thank you very much for joining us.

Martin Lewis: Hurrah. I am so sorry, everybody—for obvious reasons, it has been quite a busy day on other issues for me, so you’ll forgive me.

[The Chair]

I can’t think why it has been.

Martin Lewis: I certainly agree with the other two witnesses. Those three issues are all very important to be brought in. From a wider perspective, I was vociferously campaigning to have scam adverts brought within the scope of the Online Safety Bill. I am delighted that that has happened, but let us be honest among ourselves: it is far from a panacea.

Adverts and scams come in so many places—on social media, in search engines and in display advertising, which is very common and is not covered. While I accept that the online advertising programme will address that, if I had my way I would be bringing it all into the Online Safety Bill. However, the realpolitik is that that is not going to happen, so we have to have the support in the OAP coming later.

It is also worth mentioning just for context that, although I think there is little that we can do about this—or it would take brighter people than me—one of the biggest routes for scams is email. Everybody is being emailed—often with my face, which is deeply frustrating. We have flaccid policing of what is going on on social media, and I hope the Bill will improve it, but at least there is some policing, even though it is flaccid, and it is the same on search engines. There is nothing on email, so whatever we do in this Bill, it will not stop scams reaching people. There are many things that would improve that, certainly including far better resourcing for policing so that people who scam individuals get at least arrested and possibly even punished and sentenced. Of course, that does not happen at the moment, because scamming is a crime that you can undertake with near impunity.

There is a lot that needs to be done to make the situation work, but in general the moves in the Online Safety Bill to include scam advertising are positive. I would like to see search engines and display advertising brought into that. I absolutely support the call for the FCA to be involved, because what is and is not a scam can certainly be complicated. There are more obvious ones and less obvious ones. We saw that with the sale of bonds at 5% or 6%, which pretend to be deposit bonds but are nothing of the sort. That might get a bit more difficult for Ofcom, and it would be great to see the regulator involved. I support all the calls of the other witnesses, but we need to be honest with ourselves: even if we do all that, we are still a long way from seeing the back of all scam adverts and all scams.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, Mr Lewis. My final question is not necessarily about financial services advertising. With the rise of influencer culture, specifically on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, we are seeing a failure to disclose adverts correctly and the potential for harmful advertising. Slimming products, for example, that are not particularly safe, especially for children, are being targeted at children. What more would you like to see this Bill do to tackle some of that? I know the ASA has taken action against some prolific offenders, but what more would you like to see in this Bill to tackle that and keep children safe from adverts that are not marked as such?

Rocio Concha: To be honest, in this area we do not have any specific proposals. I completely agree with you that this is an area that needs to be tackled, but I do not have a specific proposal for this Bill.

Tim Fassam: This is an area that we have raised with the Financial Conduct Authority—particularly the trend for financial advice TikTok and adverts for non-traditional investments, such as whisky barrels or wine, which do not meet the standards required by the FCA for other investment products. That is also true of a number of cryptocurrency adverts and formats. We have been working with the FCA to try to identify ways to introduce more consistency in the application of the rule. There has been a welcome expansion by the Treasury on the promotion of high-risk investments, which is now a regulated activity in and of itself.

I go back to my initial point. We do not believe that there is any circumstance in which the FCA would want content in any place taken down where that content should not be removed, because they are the experts in identifying consumer harm in this space.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Mr Lewis, do you have anything to add?

Martin Lewis: I still believe that most of this comes down to an issue of policing. The rules are there and are not being enforced strongly enough. The people who have to enforce the rules are not resourced well enough to do that. Therefore, you get people who are able to work around the rules with impunity.

Advertising in the UK, especially online, has been the wild west for a very long time, and it will continue to be so for quite a while. The Advertising Standards Authority is actually better at dealing with the influencer issue, because of course it is primarily strong at dealing with people who listen to the Advertising Standards Authority. It is not very good at dealing with criminal scammers based outside the European Union, who frankly cannot be bothered and will not reply—they are not going to stop—but it is better at dealing with influencers who have a reputation.

We all know it is still extremely fast and loose out there. We need to adequately resource it; putting rules and laws in place is only one step. Resourcing the policing and the execution of those rules and laws is a secondary step, and I have doubts that we will ever quite get there, because resources are always squeezed and put on the back burner.

[The Chair]

Thank you. Do I have any questions from Government Back Benchers? No. Does anyone have any further questions?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Yes, I do. If nobody else has questions, I will have another bite of the cherry.

[The Chair]

The Minister is going to come in in a minute.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q I would just like to query your thoughts on a right to redress for victims. Do you think that having an ombudsman in the Bill would be appropriate, and what would you like to see to support victims of fraud?

Martin Lewis: As you will know, I had to sue Facebook for defamation, which is a ridiculous thing to do in order to stop scam adverts. I was unable to report the scam adverts to the police, because I had not been scammed—even though it was my face that was in them—and many victims were not willing to come forward. That is a rather bizarre situation, and we got Facebook to put forward £3 million to set up Citizens Advice Scam Action—that is what I settled for, as well as a scam ad reporting tool.

There are two levels here. The problem is who is at fault. Of course, those mainly at fault for scams are the scammers. They are criminals and should be prosecuted, but not enough of them are. You have times when it is the bank’s fault. If a company has not put proper precautions in place, and people have got scammed because it has put up adverts or posts that it should have prevented, they absolutely need to have some responsibility for that. I think you will struggle to have a direct redress system put in place. I would like to see it, but it would be difficult.

It is rather interesting to me that I am worried that the £3 million for Citizens Advice Scam Action, which was at least meant to provide help and support for victims of scams, is going to run out. I have not seen any more money coming from Facebook, Google or any of the other big players out there. If we are not going to fund direct redress, we could at least make sure that they fund a collective form of redress and help for the victims of scams, as a bare minimum. It is very strange that these firms go so quiet on this, and what they say is, “We are doing everything we can.”

From my meetings with these firms—these are meetings with lawyers in the room, so I have to be slightly careful—one of the things that I would warn the Committee about is that they tend to get you in and give you a presentation on all the technological reasons why they cannot stop scam adverts. My answer to them after about 30 seconds, having stopped what was meant to be an hour-long presentation, is, “I have not framed the fact that you need a technological solution. I have said you need a solution. If the answer to stopping scam adverts, and to stopping scams, is that you have to pre-vet every single advert, as old-fashioned media did, and that every advert that you put up has to have been vetted by a human being, so be it. You’re making it a function of technology, but let’s be honest: this is a function of profitability.” We have to look at the profitability of these companies when it comes to redress. What your job is—if you forgive me saying this—is to make sure that it costs them more money to let people be scammed than it does to stop people being scammed. If we solve that, we will have a lot fewer scams on social media and on the search advertising.

Rocio Concha: I completely agree with everything that Martin says. At the moment, the provisions in the Bill for “priority illegal content” require the platforms to publish reports that say, “This is how much illegal content we are seeing on the platform, and these are the measures that we are going to take.” They are also required to have a way for users to report it and to complain when they think that the platforms are not doing the right thing. At the moment, that does not apply to fraudulent advertising, so you have an opportunity to fix that in the Bill very easily, to at least get the transparency out there. The platform has to say, “We are finding this”—that puts pressure on the platform, because it is there and is also with the regulator—“and these are the measures that we are taking.” That gives us transparency to say, “Are these measures enough?” There should also be an easy way for the user to complain when they think that platforms are not doing the right thing. It is a complex question, but there are many things in the Bill that you can improve in order to improve the situation.

Tim Fassam: I wonder if it would be useful to give the Committee a case study. Members may be familiar with London Capital & Finance. Now, London Capital & Finance is one of the most significant recent scams. It sold mini-bonds fraudulently, at a very high advertised return, which then collapsed, with individuals losing all their money.

Those individuals were compensated through two vehicles. One was a Government Bill; so, they were compensated by the taxpayer. The others, because they were found to have been given financial advice despite LCF not having advice permissions or operating through a regulated product, went on to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which, among others, our members pay for; legitimate financial services companies pay for it. The most recent estimate is over £650 million. The expectation is that that will reach £1 billion at some point over the next few years, in terms of cost to the economy.

LCF was heavily driven by online advertising, and we would argue that the online platforms were in fact probably the only people who could have stopped it happening. They have profited from those adverts and they have not contributed anything to either of those two schemes. We would argue—possibly not for this Bill—that serious consideration should be given to the tech platforms being part of the financial services compensation scheme architecture and contributing to the costs of scams that individuals have fallen foul of, as an additional incentive for them to get on top of this problem.

Martin Lewis: That is a very important point, but I will just pick up on what Rocio was saying. One of the things that I would like to see, as well as much more rigid requirements of how reporting scams can be put in place—because I cannot see proper pre-vetting happening with these technology companies, but we can at least rely on social policing and reporting of scams. There are many people who recognise a scam, just as there are many people who do not recognise a scam.

However, I also think this is a wonderful opportunity to make sure that the method, the language and the symbols used for reporting scams are universal in the UK, so that whatever site you are on, if you see an advert you click the same symbol, and the process is unified and universal, and works in a very similar way, so that you can report a scam the same way on every site, which makes it simpler, and we can train people in how to do it and we can make the processes work.

Then, of course, we have to make sure that they act on the back of reports, but simply the various ways it is reported, and the complexity, and the number of clicks that you need to make mean it is a lot easier generally to click on an advert than it is to click to report an advert that is a scam. And with so many scams out there, I think there should be a parity of ease between those two factors.

[Caroline Ansell]

Q May I ask, directly related to that, about the complaints procedure? What would you like to see in terms of changes there, to make it more unified, more universal and simpler? It has been suggested that it is not robust enough, not dynamic enough and not fast enough.

Rocio Concha: There were complaints from the users. At the moment, this Bill will not allow this for fraudulent advertising. So, we need to make sure that it is a requirement for the platforms to allow and to have an easy tool for people to complain and to report when they see something that is fraudulent. At the moment, the Bill does not do that. It is an easy fix; you can do it. And then the user will have that tool. It would also give us transparency for the regulator and for organisations such as ours, to see what is happening and to see what measures the platforms are taking.

Tim Fassam: I would agree with that. I would also highlight a particular problem that our members have flagged, and we have flagged directly with Meta and Instagram. Within the definition in the Bill of individuals who can raise concern about social media platforms, our members find they fall between two stools, because quite often what is happening is that people are claiming an association with a legitimate firm. So they will have a firm’s logo, or a firm’s web address, in their profile for their social media and then they will not directly claim to be a financial adviser but imply an association with a legitimate financial advice firm. This happens surprisingly frequently.

Our members find it incredibly difficult to get those accounts taken down, because it is not a fraudulent account; that individual is not pretending to be someone else and they are not the individual claiming pretence. They are not directly claiming to be an employee; they could just say they are a fan of the company. And they are not a direct victim of this individual. What happens is that when they report, it goes into a volume algorithm, and only if a very large number of complaints are made does that particular site get taken down. I think that could be expanded to include complaints from individuals affected by the account, rather than directly believing they are pretending to be that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We now have Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee. Thank you for joining us.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Good afternoon, Frances. Thank you for joining us.

Frances Haugen: Thank you so much for inviting me.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

No problem. Could you give us a brief overview of how, in your opinion, platforms such as Meta will be able to respond to the Bill if it is enacted in its current form?

Frances Haugen: There are going to be some pretty strong challenges in implementing the Bill as it is currently written. I want to be really honest with you about the limitations of artificial intelligence. We call it artificial intelligence, but people who actually build these systems call it machine learning, because it is not actually intelligent. One of the major limitations in the Bill is that there are carve-outs, such as “content of democratic importance”, that computers will not be able to distinguish. That might have very serious implications. If the computers cannot differentiate between whether something is or is not hate speech, imagine a concept even more ambiguous that requires even more context, such as defining what is of democratic importance. If we have carve-outs like that, it may actually prevent the platforms from doing any content moderation, because they will never know whether a piece of content is safe or not safe.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q You have just answered my question on AI and algorithmic intention. When I questioned Meta in Tuesday’s oral evidence session, they were unable to tell me how many human moderators they had directly working for them and how many had abided by a UK standard and code of conduct. Do you see the lack of human moderators being a problem as the Bill is enacted by platforms such as Meta?

Frances Haugen: I think it is unacceptable that large corporations such as this do not answer very basic questions. I guarantee you that they know exactly how many moderators they have hired—they have dashboards to track these numbers. The fact that they do not disclose those numbers shows why we need to pass laws to have mandatory accountability. The role of moderators is vital, especially for things like people questioning judgment decisions. Remember, no AI system is going to be perfect, and one of the major ways people can have accountability is to be able to complain and say, “This was inaccurately judged by a computer.” We need to ensure that there is always enough staffing and that moderators can play an active role in this process.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q One final question from me, because I know others will want to come in. How do you think platforms such as Meta—I know we have used Meta as an example, but there are others—can be incentivised, beyond the statutory duty that we are currently imposing, to publish their data to allow academics and researchers into their platforms to examine exactly what is going on? Or is this the only way?

Frances Haugen: All industries that live in democratic societies must live within democratic processes, so I do believe that it is absolutely essential that we the public, through our democratic representatives like yourself, have mandatory transparency. The only two other paths I currently see towards getting any transparency out of Meta, because Meta has demonstrated that it does not want to give even the slightest slivers of data—for example, how many moderators there are—are via ESG, so we can threaten then with divestment by saying, “Prosocial companies are transparent with their data,” and via litigation. In the United States, sometimes we can get data out of these companies through the discovery process. If we want consistent and guaranteed access to data, we must put it in the Bill, because those two routes are probabilistic—we cannot ensure that we will get a steady, consistent flow of data, which is what we need to have these systems live within a democratic process.

[Mrs Miller]

Q Turning to the issue of child safety and online abuse with images involving children, what should be added to or removed from the Bill to improve how it protects children online? Have you got any thoughts on that? Some groups have described the Bill’s content as overly broad. Would you make any comments on how effective it will be in terms of online safety for children?

Frances Haugen: I am not well versed on the exact provisions in the Bill regarding child safety. What I can say is that one of the most important things that we need to have in there is transparency around how the platforms in general keep children under the age of 13 off their systems—transparency on those processes—because we know that Facebook is doing an inadequate job. That is the single biggest lever in terms of child safety.

I have talked to researchers at places like Oxford and they talk about how, with social media, one of the critical windows is when children transition through puberty, because they are more sensitive on issues, they do not have great judgment yet and their lives are changing in really profound ways. Having mandatory transparency on what platforms are doing to keep kids off their platforms, and the ability to push for stronger interventions, is vital, because keeping kids off them until they are at least 13, if not 16, is probably the biggest single thing we can do to move the ball down the field for child safety.

Online Safety Bill (Third sitting)

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate - 3rd sitting
Thursday 26th May 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Before we hear oral evidence, I invite Members to declare any interests in connection with the Bill.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I need to declare an interest, Ms Rees. Danny Stone from the Antisemitism Policy Trust provides informal secretariat in a personal capacity to the all-party parliamentary group on wrestling, which I co-chair.

[The Chair]

That is noted. Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Mat Ilic, William Moy, Professor Lorna Woods MBE and William Perrin OBE gave evidence.

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from Mat Ilic, chief development officer at Catch22; William May, chief executive at Full Fact; and Professor Lorna Woods and William Perrin of the Carnegie UK Trust. Before calling the first Member, I remind all Members that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill and that we must stick to the timings in the programme order that the Committee agreed. For this session, we have until 12.15 pm. I call Alex Davies- Jones to begin the questioning.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q187 Good morning to our witnesses. Thank you for joining us today. One of the main criticisms of the Bill is that the vast majority of the detail will not be available until after the legislation is enacted, under secondary legislation and so on. Part of the problem is that we are having difficulty in differentiating the “legal but harmful” content. What impact does that have?

William Perrin: At Carnegie, we saw this problem coming some time ago, and we worked in the other place with Lord McNally on a private Member’s Bill —the Online Harms Reduction Regulator (Report) Bill—that, had it carried, would have required Ofcom to make a report on a wide range of risks and harms, to inform and fill in the gaps that you have described.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

On a point of order, Ms Rees. There is a gentleman taking photographs in the Gallery.

[The Chair]

There is no photography allowed here.

William Perrin: Unfortunately, that Bill did not pass and the Government did not quite take the hint that it might be good to do some prep work with Ofcom to provide some early analysis to fill in holes in a framework Bill. The Government have also chosen in the framework not to bring forward draft statutory instruments or to give indications of their thinking in a number of key areas of the Bill, particularly priority harms to adults and the two different types of harms to children. That creates uncertainty for companies and for victims, and it makes the Bill rather hard to scrutinise.

I thought it was promising that the Government brought forward a list of priority offences in schedule 7 —I think that is where it is; I get these things mixed up, despite spending hours reading the thing. That was helpful to some extent, but the burden is on the Government to reduce complexity by filling in some of the blanks. It may well be better to table an amendment to bring some of these things into new schedules, as we at Carnegie have suggested—a schedule 7A for priority harms to adults, perhaps, and a 7B and 7C for children and so on—and then start to fill in some of the blanks in the regime, particularly to reassure victims.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Thank you. Does anybody else want to comment?

William Moy: There is also a point of principle about whether these decisions should be made by Government later or through open, democratic, transparent decision making in Parliament.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q That brings me on to my next point, William, relating to concerns about the powers that the Bill gives to the Secretary of State and about the independence of the regulator and the impact that could have. Do you have any comments on that?

William Moy: Sure. I should point out—we will need to get to this later—the fact that the Bill is not seriously trying to address misinformation and disinformation at this point, but in that context, we all know that there will be another information incident that will have a major effect on the public. We have lived through the pandemic, when information quality has been a matter of life and death; we are living through information warfare in the context of Ukraine, and more will come. The only response to that in the Bill is in clause 146, which gives the Secretary of State power to direct Ofcom to use relatively weak media literacy duties to respond.

We think that in an open society there should be an open mechanism for responding to information incidents—outbreaks of misinformation and disinformation that affect people’s lives. That should be set out in the roles of the regulator, the Government and internet companies, so that there is a framework that the public understand and that is open, democratic and transparent in declaring a misinformation and disinformation incident, creating proportionate responses to it, and monitoring the effects of those responses and how the incident is managed. At the moment, it largely happens behind closed doors and it involves a huge amount of restricting what people can see and share online. That is not a healthy approach in an open society.

William Perrin: I should add that as recently as April this year, the Government signed up to a recommendation of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe on principles for media and communication governance, which said that

“media and communication governance should be independent and impartial to avoid undue influence…discriminatory treatment and preferential treatment of powerful groups, including those with significant political or economic power.”

That is great. That is what the UK has done for 50 to 60 years in media regulation, where there are very few powers for the Secretary of State or even Parliament to get involved in the day-to-day working of communications regulators. Similarly, we have had independent regulation of cinema by the industry since 1913 and regulation of advertising independent of Government, and those systems have worked extremely well. However, this regime—which, I stress, Carnegie supports—goes a little too far in introducing a range of powers for the Secretary of State to interfere with Ofcom’s day-to-day doing of its business.

Clause 40 is particularly egregious, in that it gives the Secretary of State powers of direction over Ofcom’s codes of practice and, very strangely, introduces an almost infinite ability for the Government to keep rejecting Ofcom’s advice—presumably, until they are happy with the advice they get. That is a little odd, because Ofcom has a long track record as an independent, evidence-based regulator, and as Ofcom hinted in a terribly polite way when it gave evidence to this Committee, some of these powers may go a little too far. Similarly, in clause 147, the Secretary of State can give tactical guidance to Ofcom on its exercise of its powers. Ofcom may ignore that advice, but it is against convention that the Secretary of State can give that advice at all. The Secretary of State should be able to give strategic guidance to Ofcom roughly one or one and a half times per Parliament to indicate its priorities. That is absolutely fine, and is in accordance with convention in western Europe and most democracies, but the ability to give detailed guidance is rather odd.

Then, as Mr Moy has mentioned, clause 146, “Directions in special circumstances”, is a very unusual power. The Secretary of State can direct Ofcom to direct companies to make notices about things and can direct particular companies to do things without a particularly high threshold. There just have to be “reasonable grounds to believe”. There is no urgency threshold, nor is there a strong national security threshold in there, or anyone from whom the Secretary of State has to take advice in forming that judgment. That is something that we think can easily be amended down.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you. Mr Moy, you brought up the issue of misinformation and disinformation being removed from the scope of the Bill. Can you expand on your thoughts on that point?

William Moy: Absolutely. It is an extraordinary decision in a context where we are just coming through the pandemic, where information quality was such a universal concern, and we are in an information war, with the heightened risk of attempts to interfere in future elections and other misinformation and disinformation risks. It is also extraordinary because of the Minister’s excellent and thoughtful Times article, in which he pointed out that at the moment, tech companies censor legal social media posts at vast scale, and this Bill does nothing to stop that. In fact, the Government have actively asked internet companies to do that censorship—it has told them to do so. I see the Minister looking surprised, so let me quote from BBC News on 5 April 2020:

“The culture secretary is to order social media companies to be more aggressive in their response to conspiracy theories linking 5G networks to the coronavirus pandemic.”

In that meeting, essentially, the internet companies were asked to make sure they were taking down that kind of content from their services. Now, in the context of a Bill where, I think, the Minister and I completely agree about our goal—tackling misinformation in an open society—there is an opportunity for this Bill to be an example to the free world of how open societies respond to misinformation, and a beacon for the authoritarian world as well.

This is the way to do that. First, set out that the Bill must cover misinformation and disinformation. We cannot leave it to internet companies, with their political incentives, their commercial convenience and their censoring instincts, to do what they like. The Bill must cover misinformation and set out an open society response to it. Secondly, we must recognise that the open society response is about empowering people. The draft Bill had a recognition that we need to modernise the media literacy framework, but we do not have that in this Bill, which is really regrettable. It would be a relatively easy improvement to create a modern, harms and safety-based media literacy framework in this Bill, empowering users to make their own decisions with good information.

Then, the Bill would need to deal with three main threats to freedom of expression that threaten the good information in our landscape. Full Fact as a charity exists to promote informed and improved public debate, and in the long run we do that by protecting freedom of expression. Those three main threats are artificial intelligence, the internet companies and our own Government, and there are three responses to them. First, we must recognise that the artificial intelligence that internet companies use is highly error-prone, and it is a safety-critical technology. Content moderation affects what we can all see and share; it affects our democracy, it affects our health, and it is safety-critical. In every other safety-critical industry, that kind of technology would be subject to independent third-party open testing. Cars are crashed against walls, water samples are taken and tested, even sofas are sat on thousands of times to check they are safe, but internet companies are subject to no third-party independent open scrutiny. The Bill must change that, and the crash test dummy test is the one I would urge Members to apply.

The second big threat, as I said, is the internet companies themselves, which too often reach for content restrictions rather than free speech-based and information-based interventions. There are lots of things you can do to tackle misinformation in a content-neutral way—creating friction in sharing, asking people to read a post before they share it—or you can tackle misinformation by giving people information, rather than restricting what they can do; fact-checking is an example of that. The Bill should say that we prefer content-neutral and free speech-based interventions to tackle misinformation to content-restricting ones. At the moment the Bill does not touch that, and thus leaves the existing system of censorship, which the Minister has warned about, in place. That is a real risk to our open society.

The final risk to freedom of expression, and therefore to tackling misinformation, are the Government themselves. I have just read you an example of a Government bringing in internet companies to order them around by designating their terms and conditions and saying certain content is unacceptable. That content then starts to get automatically filtered out, and people are stopped from seeing it and sharing it online. That is a real risk. Apart from the fact that they press released it, that is happening behind closed doors. Is that acceptable in an open democratic society, or do we think there should be a legal framework governing when Governments can seek to put pressure on internet companies to affect what we can all see and share? I think that should be governed by a clear legislative framework that sets out if those functions need to exist, what they are and what their parameters are. That is just what we would expect for any similarly sensitive function that Government carry out.

[The Chair]

Thank you. I am going to bring Maria Miller in now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Good morning, witnesses. Thank you for joining us today. Does the Bill give Ofcom discretion to regulate on the smaller but high-risk platforms?

Danny Stone: First, thank you for having me today. We have made various representations about the problems that we think there are with small, high-harm platforms. The Bill creates various categories, and the toughest risk mitigation is on the larger services. They are defined by their size and functionality. Of course, if I am determined to create a platform that will spread harm, I may look at the size threshold that is set and make a platform that falls just below it, in order to spread harm.

It is probably important to set out what this looks like. The Community Security Trust, which is an excellent organisation that researches antisemitism and produces incident figures, released a report called “Hate Fuel” in June 2020. It looked at the various small platforms and highlighted that, in the wake of the Pittsburgh antisemitic murders, there had been 26 threads, I think, with explicit calls for Jews to be killed. One month prior to that, in May 2020, a man called Payton Gendron found footage of the Christchurch attacks. Among this was legal but harmful content, which included the “great replacement” theory, GIFs and memes, and he went on a two-year journey of incitement. A week or so ago, he targeted and killed 10 people in Buffalo. One of the things that he posted was:

“Every Time I think maybe I shouldn’t commit to an attack I spend 5 min of /pol/”—

which is a thread on the small 4chan platform—

“then my motivation returns”.

That is the kind of material that we are seeing: legal but harmful material that is inspiring people to go out and create real-world harm. At the moment, the small platforms do not have that additional regulatory burden. These are public-facing message boards, and this is freely available content that is promoted to users. The risks of engaging with such content are highest. There is no real obligation, and there are no consequences. It is the most available extremism, and it is the least regulated in respect of the Bill. I know that Members have raised this issue and the Minister has indicated that the Government are looking at it, but I would urge that something is done to ensure that it is properly captured in the Bill, because the consequences are too high if it is not.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thanks, Danny. So in your opinion, you would rather see a risk-based approach, as opposed to size and functionality.

Danny Stone: I think there are various options. Either you go for a risk-based approach—categorisation—or you could potentially amend it so that it is not just size and functionality. You would take into account other things—for example, characteristics are already defined in the Bill, and that might be an option for doing it.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Does anybody else want to come in on small platforms? Liron?

Liron Velleman: From the perspective of HOPE not hate, most of our work targeting and looking at far-right groups is spent on some of those smaller platforms. I think that the original intention of the Bill, when it was first written, may have been a more sensible way of looking at the social media ecospace: larger platforms could host some of this content, while other platforms were just functionally not ready to host large, international far-right groups. That has changed radically, especially during the pandemic.

Now, there are so many smaller platforms—whether small means hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands or even smaller than that—that are almost as easy to use as some of the larger platforms we all know so well. Some of the content on those smaller platforms is definitely the most extreme. There are mechanisms utilised by the far-right—not just in the UK, but around the world—to move that content and move people from some of the larger platforms, where they can recruit, on to the smaller platforms. To have a situation in which that harmful content is not looked at as stringently as content on the larger platforms is a miscategorisation of the internet.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q One of our concerns with the Bill, which we raised with the regulator, Ofcom, in Tuesday’s evidence session, is what would happen in the interim if one of those smaller categorised platforms was to grow substantially and then need to be recategorised. Our concern is about what would happen in the interim, during the recategorisation process, while that platform was allowed to disseminate harmful content. What would you like to see happen as an interim measure during recategorisation, if that provision remained in the Bill?

Liron Velleman: We have seen this similarly with the proscription of far-right terrorist groups in other legislation. It was originally quite easy to say that, eventually, the Government would proscribe National Action as a far-right terror group. What has happened since is that aliases and very similar organisations are set up, and it then takes months or sometimes years for the Government to be able to proscribe those organisations. We have to spend our time making the case as to why those groups should be banned.

We can foresee a similar circumstance here. We turn around and say, “Here is BitChute” or hundreds of other platforms that should be banned. We spend six months saying to the Government that it needs to be banned. Eventually, it is, but then almost immediately an offshoot starts. We think that Ofcom should have delegated power to make sure that it is able to bring those platforms into category 1 almost immediately, if the categorisations stay as they are.

Danny Stone: It could serve a notice and ensure that platforms prepare for that. There will, understandably, be a number of small platforms that are wary and do not want to be brought into that category, but some of them will need to be brought in because of the risk of harm. Let us be clear: a lot of this content may well—probably will—stay on the platform, but, at the very least, they will be forced to risk assess for it. They will be forced to apply their terms and conditions consistently. It is a step better than what they will be doing without it. Serving a notice to try to bring them into that regime as quickly as possible and ensure that they are preparing measures to comply with category 1 obligations would be helpful.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you. The Antisemitism Policy Trust has made the case that search services should be eligible for inclusion as a high-risk category. Is that still your position? What is the danger, currently, of excluding them from that provision?

Danny Stone: Very much so. You heard earlier about the problems with advertising. I recognise that search services are not the same as user-to-user services, so there does need to be some different thinking. However, at present, they are not required to address legal harms, and the harms are there.

I appeared before the Joint Committee on the draft Bill and talked about Microsoft Bing, which, in its search bar, was prompting people with “Jews are” and then a rude word. You look at “Gays are”, today, and it is prompting people with “Gays are using windmills to waft homosexual mists into your home”. That is from the search bar. The first return is a harmful article. Do the same in Google, for what it’s worth, and you get “10 anti-gay myths debunked.” They have seen this stuff. I have talked to them about it. They are not doing the work to try to address it.

Last night, using Amazon Alexa, I searched “Is George Soros evil?” and the response, was “Yes, he is. According to an Alexa Answers contributor, every corrupt political event.” “Are the White Helmets fake?” “Yes, they are set up by an ex-intelligence officer.” The problem with that is that the search prompts—the things that you are being directed to; the systems here—are problematic, because one person could give an answer to Amazon and that prompts the response. The second one, about the White Helmets, was a comment on a website that led Alexa to give that answer.

Search returns are not necessarily covered because, as I say, they are not the responsibility of the internet companies, but the systems that they design as to how those things are indexed and the systems to prevent them going to harmful sites by default are their responsibility, and at present the Bill does not address that. Something that forces those search companies to have appropriate risk assessments in place for the priority harms that Parliament sets, and to enforce those terms and conditions consistently, would be very wise.

[Kim Leadbeater]

Q Thank you to the witnesses for joining us today. The Bill contains duties to protect content of “democratic importance” and “journalistic content”. What is your view of these measures and their likely effectiveness?

Liron Velleman: These are both pretty dangerous clauses. We are very concerned about what I would probably be kind and call their unintended consequences. They are loopholes that could allow some of the most harmful and hateful actors to spread harm on social media. I will take “journalistic” first and then move on to “democratic”.

A number of companies mentioned in the previous evidence session are outlets that could be media publications just by adding a complaints system to their website. There is a far-right outlet called Urban Scoop that is run by Tommy Robinson. They just need to add a complaints system to their website and then they would be included as a journalist. There are a number of citizen journalists who specifically go to our borders to harass people who are seeking refuge in this country. They call themselves journalists; Tommy Robinson himself calls himself a journalist. These people have been specifically taken off platforms because they have repeatedly broken the terms of service of those platforms, and we see this as a potential avenue for them to make the case that they should return.

We also see mainstream publications falling foul of the terms of service of social media companies. If I take the example of the Christchurch massacre, social media companies spent a lot of time trying to take down both the livestream of the attack in New Zealand and the manifesto of the terrorist, but the manifesto was then put on the Daily Mail website—you could download the manifesto straight from the Daily Mail website—and the livestream was on the Daily Mirror and The Sun’s websites. We would be in a situation where social media companies could take that down from anyone else, but they would not be able to take it down from those news media organisations. I do not see why we should allow harmful content to exist on the platform just because it comes from a journalist.

On “democratic”, it is still pretty unclear what the definition of democratic speech is within the Bill. If we take it to be pretty narrow and just talk about elected officials and candidates, we know that far-right organisations that have been de-platformed from social media companies for repeatedly breaking the terms of service—groups such as Britain First and, again, Tommy Robinson—are registered with the Electoral Commission. Britain First ran candidates in the local elections in 2022 and they are running in the Wakefield by-election, so, by any measure, they are potentially of “democratic importance”, but I do not see why they should be allowed to break terms of service just because they happen to have candidates in elections.

If we take it on a wider scale and say that it is anything of “democratic importance”, anyone who is looking to cause harm could say, “A live political issue is hatred of the Muslim community.” Someone could argue that that or the political debate around the trans community in the UK is a live political debate, and that would allow anyone to go on the platform and say, “I’ve got 60 users and I’ve got something to say on this live political issue, and therefore I should be on the platform,” in order to cause that harm. To us, that is unacceptable and should be removed from the Bill. We do not want a two-tier internet where some people have the right to be racist online, so we think those two clauses should be removed.

Stephen Kinsella: At Clean up the Internet this is not our focus, although the proposals we have made, which we have been very pleased to see taken up in the Bill, will certainly introduce friction. We keep coming back to friction being one of the solutions. I am not wearing this hat today, but I am on the board of Hacked Off, and if Hacked Off were here, I think they would say that the solution—although not a perfect solution—might be to say that a journalist, or a journalistic outlet, will be one that has subjected itself to proper press regulation by a recognised press regulator. We could then possibly take quite a lot of this out of the scope of social media regulation and leave it where I think it might belong, with proper, responsible press regulation. That would, though, lead on to a different conversation about whether we have independent press regulation at the moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Q Thank you again to the witnesses for joining us this morning. I will start with Stephen Kinsella. You have spoken already about some of the issues to do with anonymity. Can you share with the Committee your view on the amendments made to the Bill, when it was introduced a couple of months ago, to give users choices over self-verification and the content they see? Do you think they are useful and helpful updates to the Bill?

Stephen Kinsella: Yes. We think they are extremely helpful. We welcome what we see in clause 14 and clause 57. There is thus a very clear right to be verified, and an ability to screen out interactions with unverified accounts, which is precisely what we asked for. The Committee will be aware that we have put forward some further proposals. I would really hesitate to describe them as amendments; I see them as shading-in areas—we are not trying to add anything. We think that it would be helpful, for instance, when someone is entitled to be verified, that verification status should also be visible to other users. We think that should be implicit, because it is meant to act as a signal to others as to whether someone is verified. We hope that would be visible, and we have suggested the addition of just a few words into clause 14 on that.

We think that the Bill would benefit from a further definition of what it means by “user identity verification”. We have put forward a proposal on that. It is such an important term that I think it would be helpful to have it as a defined term in clause 189. Finally, we have suggested a little bit more precision on the things that Ofcom should take into account when dealing with platforms. I have been a regulatory lawyer for nearly 40 years, and I know that regulators often benefit from having that sort of clarity. There is going to be negotiation between Ofcom and the platforms. If Ofcom can refer to a more detailed list of the factors it is supposed to take into account, I think that will speed the process up.

One of the reasons we particularly welcomed the structure of the Bill is that there is no wait for detailed codes of conduct because these are duties that we will be executing immediately. I hope Ofcom is working on the guidance already, but the guidance could come out pretty quickly. Then there would be the process of—maybe negotiating is the wrong word—to-and-fro with the platforms. I would be very reluctant to take too much on trust. I do not mean on trust from the Government; I mean on trust from the platforms—I saw the Minister look up quickly then. We have confidence in Government; it is the platforms we are little bit wary of. I heard the frustration expressed on Tuesday.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

indicated assent.

Stephen Kinsella: I think you said, “If platforms care about the users, why aren’t they already implementing this?” Another Member, who is not here today, said, “Why do they have to be brought kicking and screaming?” Yet, every time platforms were asked, we heard them say, “We will have to wait until we see the detail of—”, and then they would fill in whatever thing is likely to come last in the process. So we welcome the approach. Our suggestions are very modest and we are very happy to discuss them with you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Good. Thank you. I hope the Committee is reassured by those comments on the freedom of speech question.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q I will use the small amount of time we have left to ask one question. A number of other stakeholders and witnesses have expressed concerns regarding the removal of a digital media literacy strategy from the Bill. What role do you see a digital media literacy strategy playing in preventing the kind of abuse that you have been describing?

Danny Stone: I think that a media literacy strategy is really important. There is, for example, UCL data on the lack of knowledge of the word “antisemitism”: 68% of nearly 8,000 students were unfamiliar with the term’s meaning. Dr Tom Harrison has discussed cultivating cyber-phronesis—this was also in an article by Nicky Morgan in the “Red Box” column some time ago—which is a method of building practical knowledge over time to make the right decisions when presented with a moral challenge. We are not well geared up as a society—I am looking at my own kids—to educate young people about their interactions, about what it means when they are online in front of that box and about to type something, and about what might be received back. I have talked about some of the harms people might be directed to, even through Alexa, but some kind of wider strategy, which goes beyond what is already there from Ofcom—during the Joint Committee process, the Government said that Ofcom already has its media literacy requirements—and which, as you heard earlier, updates it to make it more fit for purpose for the modern age, would be very appropriate.

Stephen Kinsella: I echo that. We also think that that would be welcome. When we talk about media literacy, we often find ourselves with the platforms throwing all the obligation back on to the users. Frankly, that is one of the reasons why we put forward our proposal, because we think that verification is quite a strong signal. It can tell you quite a lot about how likely it is that what you are seeing or reading is going to be true if someone is willing to put their name to it. Seeing verification is just one contribution. We are really talking about trying to build or rebuild trust online, because that is what is seriously lacking. That is a system and design failure in the way that these platforms have been built and allowed to operate.

[Chris Philp]

Q The shadow Minister’s question is related to the removal of what was clause 103 in the old draft of the Bill. As she said, that related to media literacy. Does the panel draw any comfort from three facts? First, there is already a media literacy duty on Ofcom under section 11 of the Communications Act 2003—the now deleted clause 103 simply provided clarification on an existing duty. Secondly, last December, after the Joint Committee’s deliberations, but before the updated Bill was published, Ofcom published its own updated approach to online media literacy, which laid out the fact that it was going to expand its media literacy programme beyond what used to be in the former clause 103. Finally, the Government also have their own media literacy strategy, which is being funded and rolled out. Do those three things—including, critically, Ofcom’s own updated guidance last December—give the panel comfort and confidence that media literacy is being well addressed?

Liron Velleman: If the Bill is seeking to make the UK the safest place to be on the internet, it seems to be the obvious place to put in something about media literacy. I completely agree with what Danny said earlier: we would also want to specifically ensure—although I am sure this already exists in some other parts of Ofcom and Government business—that there is much greater media literacy for adults as well as children. There are lots of conversations about how children understand use of the internet, but what we have seen, especially during the pandemic, is the proliferation of things like community Facebook groups, which used to be about bins and a fair that is going on this weekend, becoming about the worst excesses of harmful content. People have seen conspiracy theories, and that is where we have seen some of the big changes to how the far-right and other hateful groups operate, in terms of being able to use some of those platforms. That is because of a lack of media literacy not just among children, but among the adult population. I definitely would encourage that being in the Bill, as well as anywhere else, so that we can remove some of those harms.

Danny Stone: I think it will need further funding, beyond what has already been announced. That might put a smile on the faces of some Department for Education officials, who looked so sad during some of the consultation process—trying to ensure that there is proper funding. If you are going to roll this out across the country and make it fit for purpose, it is going to cost a lot of money.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

Yes. The Bill is technology-agnostic, meaning that it does not refer specifically to technology because, obviously, technologies evolve all the time. My hon. Friend touches on fraud; the Bill was amended before its introduction to include in the scope of its duties advertisements that promote fraud, but I am happy to meet him to discuss further the particular issue he has raised.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Violence against women and girls is a systemic problem online, but the Government have failed even to name it in the Bill. The Minister knows that there is widespread support for tackling this issue in the sector and among his own Back Benchers, and I know that Members from all parties would welcome it if he went further. I ask once and for all: why have the Government failed to tackle violence against women and girls online in its most basic form and not included misogyny as a priority offence in the Bill?

[Chris Philp]

I strongly dispute the suggestion that the Bill does not protect women and girls. I have already said in response to the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) that we have created a new cyber-flashing offence and that we have named offences such as harassment, stalking and revenge porn as priority offences—

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Have you got it in the Bill?

[Chris Philp]

Those things are already priority offences in schedule 7 to the Bill. The Bill went into Committee on Tuesday and I look forward to discussing with the shadow Minister and other Committee members ideas to improve the Bill as it goes through Parliament.

Online Safety Bill (First sitting)

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 24th May 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We are now sitting in public again, and the proceedings are being broadcast. Before we start hearing from the witnesses, do any Members wish to make declarations of interest in connection with the Bill?

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

The witness on Thursday’s sitting, Danny Stone from the Antisemitism Policy Trust, is an informal secretariat in a personal capacity to the all-party parliamentary group on wrestling, which I co-chair.

[The Chair]

That is noted.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

I will open up to the floor for questions now. I call Alex Davies-Jones.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Good morning, both, and welcome to the Committee. The Bill as it stands places responsibility on Ofcom to regulate the 25,000 tech companies and the tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of websites within the UK. How does that look in practice? What technical and administrative capacity do you have to carry that function out, realistically?

Kevin Bakhurst: We should say that we feel the Bill has given us a very good framework to regulate online safety. We have been working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to make sure that the Bill gives us a practical, deliverable framework. There is no doubt that it is a challenge. As you rightly say, there will be potentially 25,000 platforms in scope, but we feel that the Bill sets out a series of priorities really clearly in terms of categories.

It is also for us to set out—we will be saying more about this in the next couple of months—how we will approach this, and how we will prioritise certain platforms and types of risk. It is important to say that the only way of achieving online safety is through what the Bill sets out, which is to look at the systems in place at the platforms, and not the individual pieces of content on them, which would be unmanageable.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, Kevin. You mentioned the categorisation of platforms. A number of stakeholders, including the platforms themselves and charities, have quite rightly raised some serious concerns around the categorisation of platforms. Would you, the regulator, prefer a risk-based approach, or the categorisation as it stands within the Bill?

Richard Wronka: We completely recognise the concerns that have been raised by stakeholders, and we have been speaking to many of them ourselves, so we have first-hand experience. I think my starting point is that the Bill captures those high-risk services, which is a really important feature of it. In particular, responsibilities around the legal content apply across all services in scope. That means that, in practice, when we are regulating, we will take a risk-based approach to whom we choose to engage with, and to where we focus our effort and attention.

We recognise that some of the debate has been about the categorisation process, which is intended to pick up high-risk and high-reach services. We understand the logic behind that. Indeed, I think we would have some concerns about the workability of an approach that was purely risk-based in its categorisation. We need an approach that we can put into operation. Currently, the Bill focuses on the reach of services and their functionality. We would have some concerns about a purely risk-based approach in terms of whether it was something that we could put into practice, given the number of services in scope.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q May I bring you back to putting this into practice, and to the recategorisation of platform and practice? If a category 2B platform as it stands in the Bill grows exponentially in size, and is spreading disinformation and incredibly harmful content quite quickly, how quickly would you be able to react as a regulator to recategorise that platform and bring it into scope as a category 1 platform? How long would that process take, and what would happen in the interim?

Richard Wronka: At the moment, the category 2B service would have transparency reporting requirements. That would be helpful, because it would be one way that the nature of harmful content on that platform could be brought to our attention, and to the public’s attention. We would also be looking at approaches that we could use to monitor the whole scope of the services, to ensure that we had a good grip of who was growing quickest and where the areas of risk were. Some of that is through engaging with the platforms themselves and a whole range of stakeholders, and some of it is through more advanced data and analytical techniques—“supervision technology”, as it is known in the regulatory jargon.

On the specifics of your question, if a company was growing very quickly, the Bill gives us the ability to look at that company again, to ask it for information to support a categorisation decision, and to recategorise it if that is the right approach and if it has met the thresholds set out by the Secretary of State. One of the thresholds regards the number of users, so if a company has moved over that threshold, we look to act as quickly as possible while running a robust regulatory process.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q So while that process is under way, there is no mechanism for you to take action against the platform.

Kevin Bakhurst: May I answer this? We have some experience of this already in the video-sharing platform regime, which is much more limited in scope, and we are already regulating a number of platforms, ranging from some very big ones such as Twitch, TikTok and Snap, down to some much smaller platforms that have caused us some concerns. We think we have the tools, but part of our approach will also be to focus on high-risk and high-impact content, even if it comes through small platforms. That is what we have already done with the video-sharing platform regime. We have to be agile enough to capture that and to move resources to it. We are doing that already with the video-sharing platform regime, even though we have only been regulating it for less than a year.

[The Chair]

Maria Miller has indicated that she would like to ask a question, so if I may, I will bring her in.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

Not immediately —go on please.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Maria.

I am just trying to get to the intricacies of this, and of what would happen during the time that it would take for you to recategorise. This platform, which is disseminating harm to both children and adults, would be allowed to carry on while the recategorisation process is under way. There is no mechanism in the Bill to stop that from happening.

Richard Wronka: A really important point here is that we will be regulating that platform from the outset for illegal content and, potentially, for how it protects children on its platform, irrespective of the categorisation approach. That is really important. We will be able to take action, and take action quickly, irrespective of how the platform is categorised. Categorisation really determines whether the adult “legal but harmful” provisions apply. That is the bit that really matters in this context.

It is worth reminding ourselves what those provisions mean: they are more a transparency and accountability measure. Those categorised category 1 platforms will need to have clear terms and conditions applied to adult “legal but harmful” content, and they will need to implement those consistently. We would expect the really serious and egregious concerns to be picked up by the “illegal” part of the regime, and the protection-of-children part of the regime. The categorisation process may go on. It may take a little time, but we will have tools to act in those situations.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q May I bring you on to the powers of the Secretary of State and the question of the regulator’s independence? The Bill will see the Secretary of State, whoever that may be, have a huge amount of personal direction over Ofcom. Do you have any other experience of being directed by a Secretary of State in this way, and what are the consequences of such an approach?

Kevin Bakhurst: We do have some experience across the various sectors that we regulate, but being directed by the Secretary of State does not happen very often. Specifically on the Bill, our strong feeling is that we think it entirely appropriate, and that the Secretary of State should be able to direct us on matters of national security and terrorist content. However, we have some concerns about the wider direction powers of the Secretary of State, and particularly the grounds on which the Secretary of State can direct public policy, and we have expressed those concerns previously.

We feel it is important that the independence of a regulator can be seen to be there and is there in practice. Legally, we feel it important that there is accountability. We have some experience of being taken to judicial review, and there must be accountability for the codes of practice that we put in place. We must be able to show why and how we have created those codes of practice, so that we can be accountable and there is absolute clarity between regulator and Government.

[Mrs Miller]

Q Thank you very much to the witnesses who have taken the time to be with us today. We are really grateful. You have already alluded to the fact that you have quite extensive experience in regulation, even in social media spaces. I think the Committee would be really interested in your view, based on your experience, about what is not in the Bill that should be.

Kevin Bakhurst: Richard has been leading this process, so he can give more detail on it, but suffice to say, we have been engaging closely with DCMS over the last year or so, and we appreciate the fact that it has taken on board a number of our concerns. What we felt we needed from the Bill was clarity as far as possible, and a balance between clarity and flexibility for this regime, which is a very fast-moving field. We feel, by and large, that the Bill has achieved that.

We still have concerns about one or two areas, to pick up on your question. We feel it is really important—hopefully this is something the Committee can contribute to—that the definition of “illegal content” is really clear for platforms, and particularly the area of intent of illegality, which at the moment might be quite tricky for the platforms to pick up on.

Richard Wronka: I completely agree with Kevin that the Bill as it stands gives us a good framework. I think the pre-legislative scrutiny process has been really helpful in getting us there, and I point out that it is already quite a broad and complex regime. We welcome the introduction of issues such as fraudulent advertising and the regulation of commercial pornographic providers, but I think there is a point about ensuring that the Bill does not expand too much further, because that might raise some practical and operational issues for us.

I completely agree with Kevin that clarity in the Bill regarding illegal content and what constitutes that is really important. An additional area that requires clarity is around some of the complex definitions in the Bill, such as journalistic content and democratically important content. Those are inherently tricky issues, but any extra clarity that Parliament can provide in those areas would be welcome.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barbara Keeley]

Just quickly, do coroners have sufficient powers? Should they have more powers to access digital data after the death of a child?

Andy Burrows: We can see what a protracted process it has been. There have been improvements to the process. It is currently a very lengthy process because of the mutual legal assistance treaty arrangements—MLAT, as they are known—by which injunctions have to be sought to get data from US companies. It has taken determination from some coroners to pursue cases, very often going up against challenges. It is an area where we think the arrangements could certainly be streamlined and simplified. The balance here should shift toward giving parents and families access to the data, so that the process can be gone through quickly and everything can be done to ease the heartbreak for families having to go through those incredibly traumatic situations.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Very briefly, Dame Rachel, I will build on what you were just saying, based on your experience as a headteacher. When I make my school visits, the teachers overwhelmingly tell me how, on a daily basis, they have to deal with the fallout from an issue that has happened online or on social media. On that matter, the digital media literacy strategy is being removed from the Bill. What is your thinking on that? How important do you see a digital media literacy strategy being at the heart of whatever policy the Government try to make regarding online safety for children?

Dame Rachel de Souza: There is no silver bullet. This is now a huge societal issue and I think that some of the things that I would want to say would be about ensuring that we have in our educational arsenal, if you like, a curriculum that has a really strong digital media literacy element. To that end, the Secretary of State for Education has just asked me to review how online harms and digital literacy are taught in schools—reviewing not the curriculum, but how good the teaching is and what children think about how the subject has been taught, and obviously what parents think, too.

I would absolutely like to see the tech companies putting some significant funding into supporting education of this kind; it is exactly the kind of thing that they should be working together to provide. So we need to look at this issue from many aspects, not least education.

Obviously, in a dream world I would like really good and strong digital media literacy in the Bill, but actually it is all our responsibility. I know from my conversations with Nadhim Zahawi that he is very keen that this subject is taught through the national curriculum, and very strongly.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q I have a quick question on parental digital literacy. You mentioned the panel that you put together of 16 to 21-year-olds. Do you think that today’s parents have the experience, understanding, skills and tools to keep their children properly safe online? Even if they are pretty hands-on and want to do that, do you think that they have all the tools they need to be able to do that?

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is a massive concern to parents. Parents talk to me all the time about their worries: “Do we know enough?” They have that anxiety, especially as their children turn nine or 10; they are thinking, “I don’t even know what this world out there is.” I think that our conversations with 16 to 21-year-olds were really reassuring, and we have produced a pamphlet for parents. It has had a massive number of downloads, because parents absolutely want to be educated in this subject.

What did young people tell us? They told us, “Use the age controls; talk to us about how much time we are spending online; keep communication open; and talk to us.” Talk to children when they’re young, particularly boys, who are likely to be shown pornography for the first time, even if there are parental controls, around the age of nine or 10. So have age-appropriate conversations. There was some very good advice about online experiences, such as, “Don’t worry; you’re not an expert but you can talk to us.” I mean, I did not grow up with the internet, but I managed parenting relatively well—my son is 27 now. I think this is a constant concern for parents.

I do think that the tech companies could be doing so much more to assist parents in digital media literacy, and in supporting them in how to keep their child safe. We are doing it as the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. I know that we are all trying to do it, but we want to see everyone step up on this, particularly the tech companies, to support parents on this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear from Ben Bradley, government relations and public policy manager at TikTok, and Katy Minshall, head of UK public policy at Twitter. We have until 11.25 for this panel of witnesses. Could the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?

Ben Bradley: I am Ben Bradley. I am a public policy manager at TikTok, leading on the Bill from TikTok.

Katy Minshall: I am Katy Minshall. I am head of UK public policy for Twitter.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Good morning, both. Thank you for joining us today. We have recently had it confirmed by the Minister in a written parliamentary question that NFTs—non-fungible tokens—will be included in the scope of the Bill. Concerns have been raised about how that will work in practice, and also in relation to GIFs, memes and other image-based content that is used on your platforms, Twitter specifically. Katy, how do you see that working in practice? Is the Bill workable in its current form to encapsulate all of that?

Katy Minshall: Thank you for inviting me here to talk about the Online Safety Bill. On whether the Bill is workable in its current form, on the one hand, we have long been supportive of an approach that looks at overall systems and processes, which I think would capture some of the emerging technologies that you are talking about. However, we certainly have questions about how are aspects of the Bill would work in practice. To give you an example, one of the late additions to the Bill was about user verification requirements, which as I understand it means that all category 1 platforms will need to offer users the opportunity to verify themselves and, in turn, those verified users have the ability to turn off interaction from unverified users. Now, while we share the Government’s policy objective of giving users more control, we certainly have some workability questions.

Just to give you one example, let’s say this existed today, and Boris Johnson turned on the feature. In practice, that would mean one of two things. Either the feature is only applicable to users in the UK, meaning that people around the world—in France, Australia, Germany or wherever it may be—are unable to interact with Boris Johnson, and only people who are verified in the UK can reply to him, tweet at him and so on, or it means the opposite and anyone anywhere can interact with Boris Johnson except those people who have chosen not to verify their identity, perhaps even in his own constituency, who are therefore are at a disadvantage in being able to engage with the Prime Minister. That is just one illustration of the sorts of workability questions we have about the Bill at present.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q You brought up the Prime Minister, so we’ll carry on down that route. One of the concerns about the Bill is the issue of protecting democratic importance. If there is an exemption for content of democratic importance, would your platforms be able to take that down?

Katy Minshall: I am sorry, do you mean—

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Would you be able to remove the content?

Katy Minshall: At present, what would be expected of companies in that scenario is not entirely clear in the Bill. There are certainly examples of content we have removed over the years for abuse and hateful conduct where the account owner that we suspended would have grounds to say, “Actually, this is content of democratic importance.” At the very least, it is worth pointing out that, in practice, it is likely to slow down our systems because we would have to build in extra steps to understand if a tweet or an account could be considered content of democratic importance, and we would therefore treat it differently.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q That brings me to my next question. Because what would be classed as content of democratic importance is so ambiguous, would your platforms even be able to detect it?

Katy Minshall: That is a really important question. At present, the Bill envisages that we would treat journalistic content differently from other types of content. I think the definition in the Bill—correct me if I get this wrong—is content for the purposes of journalism that is UK linked. That could cover huge swathes of the conversation on Twitter—links to blog posts, citizen journalists posting, front pages of news articles. The Bill envisages our having a system to separate that content from other content, and then treating that content differently. I struggle to understand how that would work in practice, especially when you layer on top the fact that so much of our enforcement is assisted by technology and algorithms. Most of the abusive content we take down is detected using algorithms; we suspend millions of spam accounts every day using automated systems. When you propose to layer something so ambiguous and complicated on top of that, it is worth considering how that might impact on the speed of enforcement across all of our platform.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you. Given the media carve-out and the journalism exemption in the Bill, how could you detect state actors that are quoting disinformation, or even misinformation?

Katy Minshall: At present, we label a number of accounts as Government actors or state-affiliated media and we take action on those accounts. We take down their tweets and in some cases we do not amplify their content because we have seen in current situations that some Governments are sharing harmful content. Again, I question the ambiguity in the Bill and how it would interact with our existing systems that are designed to ensure safety on Twitter.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you. Just one final question for Twitter. A query we raised with the Children’s Commissioner and the NSPCC is about pornography and children accessing it. A person needs to be 13 years old to join Twitter—to host a profile on the site—but you do host pornographic content; it is used mainly by sex workers to promote their trade. How does the proposed provision affect your model of business in allowing 13-year-olds and above to access your platform?

Katy Minshall: Until we see the full extent of the definitions and requirements, it is difficult to say exactly what approach we would take under the Bill. Regarding adult content, Twitter is not a service targeting a youth audience, and as you illustrate, we endeavour to give people the ability to express themselves as they see fit. That has to be balanced with the objective of preventing young people from inadvertently stumbling on such content.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q So you are not predominantly aimed at children? If you are an adult service, why is it that people aged 13 or above can access your platform?

Katy Minshall: We find that, in practice, the overwhelming majority of our user base are over the age of 18; both internal and external data show that. Of course young people can access Twitter. I think we have to be very careful that the Bill does not inadvertently lock children out of services they are entitled to use. I am sure we can all think of examples of people under the age of 18 who have used Twitter to campaign, for activism and to organise; there are examples of under-18s using Twitter to that effect. But as I say, predominantly we are not a service targeting a youth audience.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Okay. Thank you, Chair.

Online Safety Bill (Second sitting)

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 24th May 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

May I just ask you, for the benefit of Hansard, to try to speak up a little? The sound system is not all that it might be in this room, and the acoustics certainly are not.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Q Thank you to our witnesses for joining us this afternoon. Quite bluntly, I will get into it, because what is frustrating for us, as Parliamentarians, and for our constituents, is the fact that we need this legislation in the first place. Why are you, as platforms, allowing harmful and illegal content to perpetuate on your platforms? Why do we need this legislation for you to take action? It is within your gift to give, and despite all the things I am sure you are about to tell me that you are doing to prevent this issue from happening, it is happening and we are needing to legislate, so why?

[The Chair]

Mr Earley, I will go left to right to start with, if that is all right with you, so you have drawn the short straw.

Richard Earley: No worries, and thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to speak to you all today; I know that we do not have very much time. In short, we think this legislation is necessary because we believe that it is really important that democratically elected Members of Parliament and Government can provide input into the sorts of decisions that companies such as ours are making, every day, about how people use the internet. We do not believe that it is right for companies such as ours to be taking so many important decisions every single day.

Now, unfortunately, it is the case that social media reflects the society that we live in, so all of the problems that we see in our society also have a reflection on our services. Our priority, speaking for Meta and the services we provide—Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—is to do everything we can to make sure our users have as positive an experience as possible on our platform. That is why we have invested more than $13 billion over the past five years in safety and security, and have more than 40,000 people working at our company on safety and security every day.

That said, I fully recognise that we have a lot more areas to work on, and we are not waiting for this Bill to come into effect to do that. We recently launched a whole range of updated tools and technologies on Instagram, for example, to protect young people, including preventing anyone under the age of 18 from being messaged by a person they are not directly connected to. We are also using new technology to identify potentially suspicious accounts to prevent young people from appearing in any search results that those people carry out. We are trying to take steps to address these problems, but I accept there is a lot more to do.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Before I bring in Becky and Katie to answer that, I just want to bring you back to something you said about social media and your platforms reflecting society like a mirror. That analogy is used time and again, but actually they are not a mirror. The platforms and the algorithms they use amplify, encourage and magnify certain types of content, so they are not a mirror of what we see in society. You do not see a balanced view of two points of an issue, for example.

You say that work is already being done to remove this content, but on Instagram, for example, which is a platform predominantly used by women, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate has exposed what they term an “epidemic of misogynistic abuse”, with 90% of misogynistic abuse being sent via direct messaging. It is being ignored by the platform even when it is being reported to the moderators. Why is that happening?

Richard Earley: First, your point about algorithms is really important, but I do not agree that they are being used to promote harmful content. In fact, in our company, we use algorithms to do the reverse of that. We try to identify content that might break our policies—the ones we write with our global network of safety experts—and then remove those posts, or if we find images or posts that we think might be close to breaking those rules, we show them lower in people’s feeds so that they have a lower likelihood of being seen. That is why, over the past two years, we have reduced the prevalence of harmful posts such as hate speech on Facebook so that now only 0.03% of views of posts on Facebook contain that kind of hate speech—we have almost halved the number. That is one type of action that we take in the public parts of social media.

When it comes to direct messages, including on Instagram, there are a range of steps that we take, including giving users additional tools to turn off any words they do not want to see in direct messages from anyone. We have recently rolled out a new feature called “restrict” which enables you to turn off any messages or comments from people who have just recently started to follow you, for example, and have just created their accounts. Those are some of the tools that we are trying to use to address that.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q So the responsibility is on the user, rather than the platform, to take action against abuse?

Richard Earley: No, the responsibility is absolutely shared by those of us who offer platforms, by those who are engaged in abuse in society, and by civil society and users more widely. We want to ensure we are doing everything we can to use the latest technology to stop abuse happening where we can and give people who use our services the power to control their experience and prevent themselves from encountering it.

[The Chair]

We must allow the other witnesses to participate.

Becky Foreman: Thank you for inviting me to give evidence to you today. Online safety is extremely important to Microsoft and sits right at the heart of everything we do. We have a “safety by design” policy, and responsibility for safety within our organisation sits right across the board, from engineers to operations and policy people. However, it is a complicated, difficult issue. We welcome and support the regulation that is being brought forward.

We have made a lot of investments in this area. For example, we introduced PhotoDNA more than 10 years ago, which is a tool that is used right across the sector and by non-governmental organisations to scan for child sexual abuse material and remove it from their platforms. More recently, we have introduced a grooming tool that automates the process of trying to establish whether there is a conversation for grooming taking place between an adult and a child. That can then be flagged for human review. We have made that available at no charge to the industry, and it has been licensed by a US NGO called Thorn. We take this really seriously, but it is a complicated issue and we really welcome the regulation and the opportunity to work with the Government and Ofcom on this.

Katie O’Donovan: Thank you so much for having me here today and asking us to give evidence. Thank you for your question. I have worked at Google and YouTube for about seven years and I am really proud of our progress on safety in those years. We think about it in three different ways. First, what products can we design and build to keep our users safer? Similar to Microsoft, we have developed technology that identifies new child sex abuse material and we have made that available across the industry. We have developed new policies and new ways of detecting content on YouTube, which means we have really strict community guidelines, we identify that content and we take it down. Those policies that underlie our products are really important. Finally, we work across education, both in secondary and primary schools, to help inform and educate children through our “Be Internet Legends” programme, which has reached about 4 million people.

There is definitely much more that we can do and I think the context of a regulatory environment is really important. We also welcome the Bill and I think it is really going to be meaningful when Ofcom audits how we are meeting the requirements in the legislation—not just how platforms like ours are meeting the requirements in the Bill, but a wide spectrum of platforms that young people and adults use. That could have a really positive additive effect to the impact.

It is worth pausing and reflecting on legislation that has passed recently, as well. The age-appropriate design code or the children’s code that the Information Commissioner’s Office now manages has also helped us determine new ways to keep our users safe. For example, where we have long had a product called SafeSearch, which you can use on search and parents can keep a lock on, we now also put that on by default where we use signals to identify people who we think are under 18.

We think that is getting the right balance between providing a safer environment but also enabling people to access information. We have not waited for this regulation. This regulation can help us do more, and it can also level the playing field and really make sure that everyone in the industry steps up and meets the best practice that can exist.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, both, for adding context to that. If I can bring you back to what is not being done and why we need to legislate, Richard, I come back to you. You mentioned some of the tools and systems that you have put in place so users can stop abuse from happening. Why is it that that 90% of abuse on Instagram in direct messages is being ignored by your moderators?

Richard Earley: I do not accept that figure. I believe that if you look at our quarterly transparency report, which we just released last week, you can see that we find more than 90% of all the content that we remove for breaking our policies ourselves. Whenever somebody reports something on any of our platforms, they get a response from us. I think it is really important, as we are focusing on the Bill, to understand or make the point that, for private messaging, yes, there are different harms and different risks of harm that can apply, which is why the steps that we take differ from the steps that we take in public social media.

One of the things that we have noticed in the final draft of the Bill is that the original distinction between public social media and private messaging, which was contained in the online harms White Paper and in earlier drafts of the Bill, has been lost here. Acknowledging that distinction, and helping companies recognise that there is different risk and then different steps that can be taken in private messaging to what is taken on public social media, would be a really important thing for the Committee to consider.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Quite briefly, because I know we are short on time, exactly how many human moderators do you have working to take down disinformation and harmful illegal content on your platforms?

Richard Earley: We have around 40,000 people in total working on safety and security globally and, of those, around half directly review posts and content.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q How many of those are directly employed by you and how many are third party?

Richard Earley: I do not have that figure myself but I know it is predominantly the case that, in terms of the safety functions that we perform, it is not just looking at the pieces of content; it is also designing the technology that finds and surfaces content itself. As I said, more than 90% of the time—more than 95% in most cases—it is our technology that finds and removes content before anyone has to look at it or report it.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q On that technology, we have been told that you are not doing enough to remove harmful and illegal content in minority languages. This is a massive gap. In London alone, more than 250 languages are spoken on a regular basis. How do you explain your inaction on this? Can you really claim that your platform is safe if you are not building and investing in AI systems in a range of languages? What proactive steps are you taking to address this extreme content that is not in English?

Richard Earley: That group of 40,000 people that I mentioned, they operate 24 hours, 7 days a week. They cover more than 70 languages between them, which includes the vast majority of the world’s major spoken languages. I should say that people working at Meta, working on these classifiers and reviewing content, include people with native proficiency in these languages and people who can build the technology to find and remove things too. It is not just what happens within Meta that makes a difference here, but the work we do with our external partners. We have over 850 safety partners that we work with globally, who help us understand how different terms can be used and how different issues can affect the spread of harm on our platforms. All of that goes into informing both the policies we use to protect people on our platform and the technology we build to ensure those policies are followed.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Finally, which UK organisations that you use have quality assured any of their moderator training materials?

Richard Earley: I am sorry, could you repeat the question?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

The vast majority of people are third party. They are not employed directly by Meta to moderate content, so how many of the UK organisations you use have been quality assured to ensure that the training they provide in order to spot this illegal and harmful content is taken on board?

Richard Earley: I do not believe it is correct that for our company, the majority of moderators are employed by—

[Alex Davies-Jones]

You do not have the figures, so you cannot tell me.

Richard Earley: I haven’t, no, but I will be happy to let you know afterwards in our written submission. Everyone who is involved in reviewing content at Meta goes through an extremely lengthy training process that lasts multiple weeks, covering not just our community standards in total but also the specific area they are focusing on, such as violence and incitement. If it is hate speech, of course, there is a very important language component to that training, but in other areas—nudity or graphic violence—the language component is less important. We have published quite a lot about the work we do to make sure our moderators are as effective as possible and to continue auditing and training them. I would be really happy to share some of that information, if you want.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q But that is only for those employed directly by Meta.

Richard Earley: I will have to get back to you to confirm that, but I think it applies to everyone who reviews content for Meta, whether they are directly employed by Meta or through one of our outsourced-in persistent partners.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much. Don’t worry, ladies; I am sure other colleagues will have questions that they wish to pursue. Dean Russell, please.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Good afternoon. We now hear oral evidence from Professor Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University, Jessica Eagleton, policy and public affairs manager at Refuge, and Janaya Walker, public affairs manager at End Violence Against Women. Ladies, thank you very much for taking the trouble to join us this afternoon. We look forward to hearing from you.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, Sir Roger, and thank you to the witnesses for joining us. We hear a lot about the negative experiences online of women, particularly women of colour. If violence against women and girls is not mentioned directly in the Bill, if misogyny is not made a priority harm, and if the violence against women and girls code of practice is not adopted in the Bill, what will that mean for the experience of women and girls?

Janaya Walker: Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. As you have addressed there, the real consensus among violence against women and girls organisations is for VAWG to be named in the Bill. The concern is that without that, the requirements that are placed on providers of regulated services will be very narrowly tied to the priority illegal content in schedule 7, as well as other illegal content.

We are very clear that violence against women and girls is part of a continuum in which there is a really broad manifestation of behaviour; some reaches a criminal threshold, but there is other behaviour that is important to be understood as part of the wider context. Much of the abuse that women and girls face cannot be understood by only looking through a criminal lens. We have to think about the relationship between the sender and the recipient—if it is an ex-partner, for example—the severity of the abuse they have experienced, the previous history and also the reach of the content. The worry is that the outcome of the Bill will be a missed opportunity in terms of addressing something that the Government have repeatedly committed to as a priority.

As you mentioned, we have worked with Refuge, Clare McGlynn, the NSPCC and 5Rights, bringing together our expertise to produce this full code of practice, which we think the Bill should be amended to include. The code of practice would introduce a cross-cutting duty that tries to mitigate this kind of pocketing of violence against women and girls into those three categories, to ensure that it is addressed really comprehensively.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q To what extent do you think that the provisions on anonymity will assist in reducing online violence against women and girls? Will the provisions currently in the Bill make a difference?

Janaya Walker: I think it will be limited. For the End Violence Against Women Coalition, our priority above all else is having a systems-based approach. Prevention really needs to be at the heart of the Bill. We need to think about the choices that platforms make in the design and operation of their services in order to prevent violence against women and girls in the first instance.

Anonymity has a place in the sense of providing users with agency, particularly in a context where a person is in danger and they could take that step in order to mitigate harm. There is a worry, though, when we look at things through an intersectional lens—thinking about how violence against women and girls intersects with other forms of harm, such as racism and homophobia. Lots of marginalised and minoritised people rely very heavy on being able to participate online anonymously, so we do not want to create a two-tier system whereby some people’s safety is contingent on them being a verified user, which is one option available. We would like the focus to be much more on prevention in the first instance.

[The Chair]

Professor McGlynn and Ms Eagelton, you must feel free to come in if you wish to.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q My final question is probably directed at you, Professor McGlynn. Although we welcome the new communications offence of cyber-flashing, one of the criticisms is that it will not actually make a difference because of the onus on proving intent to cause harm, rather than the sender providing consent to receive the material. How do you respond to that?

Professor Clare McGlynn: I think it is great that the Government have recognised the harms of cyber-flashing and put that into the Bill. In the last couple of weeks we have had the case of Gaia Pope, a teenager who went missing and died—an inquest is currently taking place in Dorset. The case has raised the issue of the harms of cyber-flashing, because in the days before she went missing she was sent indecent images that triggered post-traumatic stress disorder from a previous rape. On the day she went missing, her aunt was trying to report that to the police, and one of the police officers was reported as saying that she was “taking the piss”.

What I think that case highlights, interestingly, is that this girl was triggered by receiving these images, and it triggered a lot of adverse consequences. We do not know why that man sent her those images, and I guess my question would be: does it actually matter why he sent them? Unfortunately, the Bill says that why he sent them does matter, despite the harm it caused, because it would only be a criminal offence if it could be proved that he sent them with the intention of causing distress or for sexual gratification and being reckless about causing distress.

That has two main consequences. First, it is not comprehensive, so it does not cover all cases of cyber-flashing. The real risk is that a woman, having seen the headlines and heard the rhetoric about cyber-flashing being criminalised, might go to report it to the police but will then be told, “Actually, your case of cyber-flashing isn’t criminal. Sorry.” That might just undermine women’s confidence in the criminal justice system even further.

Secondly, this threshold of having to prove the intention to cause distress is an evidential threshold, so even if you think, as might well be the case, that he sent the image to cause distress, you need the evidence to prove it. We know from the offence of non-consensual sending of sexual images that it is that threshold that limits prosecutions, but we are repeating that mistake here with this offence. So I think a consent-based, comprehensive, straightforward offence would send a stronger message and be a better message from which education could then take place.

[The Chair]

You are nodding, Ms Eagelton.

Jessica Eagelton: I agree with Professor McGlynn. Thinking about the broader landscape and intimate image abuse as well, I think there are some significant gaps. There is quite a piecemeal approach at the moment and issues that we are seeing in terms of enforcing measures on domestic abuse as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from Lulu Freemont, head of digital regulation at techUK; Ian Stevenson, the chairman of OSTIA; and Adam Hildreth, chief executive officer of Crisp, who is appearing by Zoom—and it works. Thank you all for joining us. I will not waste further time by asking you to identify yourselves, because I have effectively done that for you. Without further ado, I call Alex Davies-Jones.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, Sir Roger; thank you, witnesses. We want the UK to become a world leader in tech start-ups. We want those employment opportunities for the future. Does this legislation, as it currently stands, threaten that ability?

Lulu Freemont: Hi everybody. Thank you so much for inviting techUK to give evidence today. Just to give a small intro to techUK, so that you know the perspective I am coming from, we are the trade body for the tech sector. We have roughly 850 tech companies in our membership, the majority of which are small and medium-sized enterprises. We are really focused on how this regime will work for the 25,000 tech companies that are set to be in scope, and our approach is really on the implementation and how the Bill can deliver on the objectives.

Thank you so much for the question. There are some definite risks when we think about smaller businesses and the Online Safety Bill. Today, we have heard a lot of the names that come up with regard to tech companies; they are the larger companies. However, this will be a regime that impacts thousands of different tech companies, with different functionalities and different roles within the ecosystem, all of which contribute to the economy in their own way.

There are specific areas to be addressed in the Bill, where there are some threats to innovation and investment by smaller businesses. First, greater clarity is needed. In order for this regime to be workable for smaller businesses, they need clarity on guidelines and on definitions, and they also need to be confident that the systems and processes that they put in place will be sustainable—in other words, the right ones.

Certain parts of the regime risk not having enough clarity. The first thing that I will point to is around the definitions of harm. We would very much welcome having some definitions of harmful content, or even categories of harmful content, in primary legislation. It might then be for Ofcom to determine how those definitions are interpreted within the codes, but having things to work off and types of harmful content for smaller businesses to start thinking about would be useful; obviously, that will be towards children, given that they are likely to be category 2.

The second risk for smaller businesses is really around the powers of the Secretary of State. I think there is a real concern. The Secretary of State will have some technical powers, which are pretty much normal; they are what you would expect in any form of regulation. However, the Online Safety Bill goes a bit further than that, introducing some amendment powers. So, the Secretary of State can modify codes of practice to align with public policy. In addition to that, there are provisions to allow the Secretary of State to set thresholds between the categories of companies.

Smaller businesses want to start forming a strong relationship with Ofcom and putting systems and processes in place that they can feel confident in. If they do not have that level of confidence and if the regime could be changed at any point, they might not be able to progress with those systems and processes, and when it comes to kind of pushing them out of the market, they might not be able to keep up with some of the larger companies that have been very much referenced in every conversation.

So, we need to think about proportionality, and we need to think about Ofcom’s independence and the kind of relationship that it can form with smaller businesses. We also need to think about balance. This regime is looking to strike a balance between safety, free speech and innovation in the UK’s digital economy. Let us just ensure that we provide enough clarity for businesses so that they can get going and have confidence in what they are doing.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you, Lulu. Adam and Ian, if either of you want to come in at any point, please just indicate that and I will bring you in.

[The Chair]

May I just apologise before we go any further, because I got you both the wrong way round? I am sorry. It is Mr Stevenson who is online and it is Adam Hildreth who is here in body and person.

Adam Hildreth: I think we have evolved as a world actually, when it comes to online safety. I think that if you went back five or 10 years, safety would have come after your people had developed their app, their platform or whatever they were creating from a tech perspective. I think we are now in a world where safety, in various forms, has to be there by default. And moving on to your point, we have to understand what that means for different sizes of businesses. The risk assessment word or phrase for me is the critical part there, which is putting blocks in front of people who are innovating and creating entrepreneurial businesses that make the online world a better place. Putting those blocks in without them understanding whether they can compete or not in an open and fair market is where we do not want to be.

So, getting to the point where it is very easy to understand is important—a bit like where we got to in other areas, such as data protection and where we went with the GDPR. In the end, it became simplified; I will not use the word “simplified” ever again in relation to GDPR, but it did become simplified from where it started. It is really important for anyone developing any type of tech platform that the Online Safety Bill will affect that they understand exactly what they do and do not have to put in place; otherwise, they will be taken out just by not having a legal understanding of what is required.

The other point to add, though, is that there is a whole other side to online safety, which is the online safety tech industry. There are tons of companies in the UK and worldwide that are developing innovative technologies that solve these problems. So, there is a positive as well as an understanding of how the Bill needs to be created and publicised, so that people understand what the boundaries are, if you are a UK business.

[The Chair]

Mr Stevenson, you are nodding. Do you want to come in?

Ian Stevenson: I agree with the contributions from both Adam and Lulu. For me, one of the strengths of the Bill in terms of the opportunity for innovators is that so much is left to Ofcom to provide codes of practice and so on in the future, but simultaneously that is its weakness in the short term. In the absence of those codes of practice and definitions of exactly where the boundaries between merely undesirable and actually harmful and actionable might lie, the situation is very difficult. It is very difficult for companies like my own and the other members of the Online Safety Tech Industry Association, who are trying to produce technology to support safer experiences online, to know exactly what that technology should do until we know which harms are in scope and exactly what the thresholds are and what the definitions of those harms are. Similarly, it is very hard for anybody building a service to know what technologies, processes and procedures they will need until they have considerably more detailed information than they have at the moment.

I agree that there are certain benefits to having more of that in the Bill, especially when it comes to the harms, but in terms of the aspiration and of what I hear is the objective of the Bill—creating safer online experiences—we really need to understand when we are going to have much more clarity and detail from Ofcom and any other relevant party about exactly what is going to be seen as best practice and acceptable practice, so that people can put in place those measures on their sites and companies in the Online Safety Tech Industry Association can build the tools to help support putting those measures in place.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you all. Lulu, you mentioned concerns about the Secretary of State’s powers and Ofcom’s independence. Other concerns expressed about Ofcom include its ability to carry out this regulation. It is being hailed as the saviour of the internet by some people. Twenty-five thousand tech companies in the UK will be under these Ofcom regulations, but questions have been asked about its technical and administrative capacity to do this. Just today, there is an online safety regulator funding policy adviser role being advertised by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Part of the key roles and responsibilities are:

“The successful post holder will play a key role in online safety as the policy advisor on Funding for the Online Safety Regulator.”

Basically, their job is to raise money for Ofcom. Does that suggest concerns about the role of Ofcom going forward, its funding, and its resource and capacity to support those 25,000 platforms?

Lulu Freemont: It is a very interesting question. We really support Ofcom in this role. We think that it has a very good track record with other industries that are also in techUK’s membership, such as broadcasters. It has done a very good job at implementing proportionate regulation. We know that it has been increasing its capacity for some time now, and we feel confident that it is working with us as the trade and with a range of other experts to try to understand some of the detail that it will have to understand to regulate.

One of the biggest challenges—we have had this conversation with Ofcom as well—is to understand the functionalities of tech services. The same functionality might be used in a different context, and that functionality could be branded as very high risk in one context but very low risk in another. We are having those conversations now. It is very important that they are being had now, and we would very much welcome Ofcom publishing drafts. We know that is its intention, but it should bring everything forward in terms of all the gaps in this regulation that are left to Ofcom’s codes, guidance and various other documentation.

Adam Hildreth: One of the challenges that I hear a lot, and that we hear a lot at Crisp in our work, is that people think that the Bill will almost eradicate all harmful content everywhere. The challenge that we have with content is that every time we create a new technology or mechanism that defeats harmful or illegal content, the people who are creating it—they are referred to in lots of ways, but bad actors, ultimately—create another mechanism to do it. It is very unlikely that we will ever get to a situation in which it is eradicated from every platform forever—though I hope we do.

What is even harder for a regulator is to be investigating why a piece of content is on a platform. If we get to a position where people are saying, “I saw this bit of content; it was on a platform,” that will be a really dangerous place to be, because the funding requirement for any regulator will go off the charts—think about how much content we consume. I would much prefer to be in a situation where we think about the processes and procedures that a platform puts in place and making them appropriate, ensuring that if features are aimed at children, they do a risk assessment so that they understand how those features are being used and how they could affect children in particular—or they might have a much more diverse user group, whereby harm is much less likely.

So, risk assessments and, as Ian mentioned, technologies, processes and procedures—that is the bit that a regulator can do well. If your risk assessment is good and your technology, process and procedures are as good as they can be based on a risk assessment, that almost should mean that you are doing the best job you possibly can to stop that content appearing, but you are not eradicating it. It really worries me that we are in a position whereby people are going to expect that they will never see content on a platform again, even though billions of pieces of potentially harmful content could have been removed from those platforms.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q On that point, you mentioned that it is hard to predict the future and to regulate on the basis of what is already there. We have waited a long time for the Bill, and in that time we have had new platforms and new emerging technology appear. How confident are you that the Bill allows for future-proofing, in order that we can react to anything new that might crop up on the internet?

Adam Hildreth: I helped personally in 2000 and 2001, when online grooming did not even exist as a law, so I have been involved in this an awful long time, waiting for laws to exist. I do not think we will ever be in a situation in which they are future-proofed if we keep putting every possibility into law. There needs to be some principles there. There are new features launched every day, and assessments need to be made about who they pose a risk to and the level of risk. In the same way as you would do in all kinds of industries, someone should do an assessment from a health and safety perspective. From that, you then say, “Can we even launch it at all? Is it feasible? Actually, we can, because we can take this amount of risk.” Once they understand those risk assessments, technology providers can go further and develop technology that can combat this.

If we can get to the point where it is more about process and the expectations around people who are creating any types of online environments, apps or technologies, it will be future-proofed. If we start trying to determine exact pieces of content, what will happen is that someone will work out a way around it tomorrow, and that content will not be included in the Bill, or it will take too long to get through and suddenly, the whole principle of why we are here and why we are having this discussion will go out the window. That is what we have faced every day since 1998: every time the technology works out how to combat a new risk—whether that is to children, adults, the economy or society—someone comes along and works out a way around the technology or around the rules and regulations. It needs to move quickly; that will future-proof it.

[The Chair]

I have four Members plus the Minister to get in, so please be brief. I call Dean Russell.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear from Rhiannon-Faye McDonald, victim and survivor advocate at the Marie Collins Foundation, and Susie Hargreaves, chief executive at the Internet Watch Foundation. Thank you for joining us this afternoon; first question, please.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you both for joining us this afternoon. One of the key objectives of the legislation is to ensure that a high level of protection for children and adults is in place. In your view, does the Bill in its current form achieve that?

Susie Hargreaves: Thank you very much for inviting me today. I think the Bill is working in the right direction. Obviously, the area that we at the IWF are concerned with is child sexual abuse online, and from our point of view, the Bill does need to make a few changes in order to put those full protections in place for children.

In particular, we have drafted an amendment to put co-designation on the face of the Bill. When it comes to child sexual abuse, we do not think that contracting out is an acceptable approach, because we are talking about the most egregious form of illegal material—we are talking about children—and we need to ensure that Ofcom is not just working in a collaborative way, but is working with experts in the field. What is really important for us at the moment is that there is nothing in the Bill to ensure that the good work that has been happening over 25 years in this country, where the IWF is held up as a world leader, is recognised, and that that expertise is assured on the face of the Bill. We would like to see that amendment in particular adopted, because the Bill needs to ensure that there are systems and processes in place for dealing with illegal material. The IWF already works with internet companies to ensure they take technical services.

There needs to be a strong integration with law enforcement—again, that is already in place with the memorandum of understanding between CPS, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the IWF. We also need clarity about the relationship with Ofcom so that child sexual abuse, which is such a terrible situation and such a terrible crime, is not just pushed into the big pot with other harms. We would like to see those specific changes.

Rhiannon-Faye McDonald: Generally, we think the Bill is providing a higher standard of care for children, but there is one thing in particular that I would like to raise. Like the IWF, the Marie Collins Foundation specialises in child sexual abuse online, specifically the recovery of people who have been affected by child sexual abuse.

The concern I would like to raise is around the contextual CSA issue. I know this has been raised before, and I am aware that the Obscene Publications Act 1959 has been brought into the list of priority offences. I am concerned that that might not cover all contextual elements of child sexual abuse: for example, where images are carefully edited and uploaded to evade content moderation, or where there are networks of offenders who are able to gain new members, share information with each other, and lead other people to third-party sites where illegal content is held. Those things might not necessarily be caught by the illegal content provisions; I understand that they will be dealt with through the “legal but harmful” measures.

My concern is that the “legal but harmful” measures do not need to be implemented by every company, only those that are likely to be accessed by children. There are companies that can legitimately say that the majority of their user base is not children, and therefore would not have to deal with that, but that provides a space for this contextual CSA to happen. While those platforms may not be accessed by children as much as other platforms, it still provides a place for this to happen—the harm can still occur, even if children do not come across it as much as they would elsewhere.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q On that point, one of the concerns that has been raised by other stakeholders is about the categorisation of platforms—for example, category 1 and category 2B have different duties on them, as Ofcom is the regulator. Would you rather see a risk-based approach to platforms, rather than categorisation? What are your thoughts on that?

Susie Hargreaves: We certainly support the concept of a risk-based approach. We host very little child sexual abuse content in the UK, with the majority of the content we see being hosted on smaller platforms in the Netherlands and other countries. It is really important that we take a risk-based approach, which might be in relation to where the content is—obviously, we are dealing with illegal content—or in relation to where children are. Having a balance there is really important.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q A final question from me. We heard concerns from children’s charities and the Children’s Commissioner that the Bill does not account for breadcrumbing—the cross-platform grooming that happens on platforms. What more could the Bill do to address that, and do you see it as an omission and a risk?

Susie Hargreaves: I think we probably have a slightly different line from that of some of the other charities you heard from this morning, because we think it is very tricky and nuanced. What we are trying to do at the moment is define what it actually means and how we would have to deal with it, and we are working very closely with the Home Office to go through some of those quite intense discussions. At the moment, “harmful” versus “illegal” is not clearly defined in law, and it could potentially overwhelm certain organisations if we focus on the higher-level harms and the illegal material. We think anything that protects children is essential and needs to be in the Bill, but we need to have those conversations and to do some more work on what that means in reality. We are more interested in the discussions at the moment about the nuance of the issue, which needs to be mapped out properly.

One of the things that we are very keen on in the Bill as a whole is that there should be a principles-based approach, because we are dealing with new harms all the time. For example, until 2012 we had not seen self-generated content, which now accounts for 75% of the content we remove. So we need constantly to change and adapt to new threats as they come online, and we should not make the Bill too prescriptive.

[The Chair]

Ms McDonald?

Rhiannon-Faye McDonald: I was just thinking of what I could add to what Susie has said. My understanding is that it is difficult to deal with cross-platform abuse because of the ability to share information between different platforms—for example, where a platform has identified an issue or offender and not shared that information with other platforms on which someone may continue the abuse. I am not an expert in tech and cannot present you with a solution to that, but I feel that sharing intelligence would be an important part of the solution.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Finally this afternoon, we will hear from Ellen Judson, who is the lead researcher at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, and Kyle Taylor, who is the founder and director of Fair Vote. Thank you for joining us this afternoon.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Thank you both for joining us, and for waiting until the end of a very long day. We appreciate it.

There is a wide exemption in the Bill for the media and for journalistic content. Are you concerned that that is open to abuse?

Kyle Taylor: Oh, absolutely. There are aspects of the Bill that are extremely worrying from an online safety perspective: the media exemption, the speech of democratic importance exemption, and the fact that a majority of paid ads are out of scope. We know that a majority of harmful content originates from or is amplified by entities that meet one of those exceptions. What that means is that the objective of the Bill, which is to make the online world safer, might not actually be possible, because platforms, at least at present, are able to take some actions around these through their current terms and conditions, but this will say explicitly that they cannot act.

One real-world example is the white supremacist terror attack just last week in Buffalo, in the United States. The “great replacement” theory that inspired the terrorist was pushed by Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who would meet the media exemption; by right-wing blogs, which were set up by people who claim to be journalists and so would meet the journalistic standards exemption; by the third-ranking House Republican, who would meet the democratic importance exemption; and it was even run as paid ads by those candidates. In that one example, you would not be able to capture a majority of the way that harm spreads online.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Is there a way in which the exemptions could be limited to ensure that the extremists you have mentioned cannot take advantage of them?

Ellen Judson: I think there are several options. The primary option, as we would see it, is that the exemptions are removed altogether, on the basis that if the Bill is really promoting a systems-based approach rather than focusing on individual small categories of content, then platforms should be required to address their systems and processes whenever those lead to an increased risk of harm. If that leads to demotion of media content that meets those harmful thresholds, that would seem appropriate within that response.

If the exemptions are not to be removed, they could be improved. Certainly, with regard to the media exemption specifically, I think the thresholds for who qualifies as a recognised news publisher could be raised to make it more difficult for bad actors and extremists, as Kyle mentioned, simply to set up a website, add a complaints policy, have an editorial code of conduct and then say that they are a news publisher. That could involve linking to existing publishers that are already registered with existing regulators, but I think there are various ways that could be strengthened.

On the democratic importance and journalism exemptions, I think the issue is that the definitions are very broad and vague; they could easily be interpreted in any way. Either they could be interpreted very narrowly, in which case they might not have much of an impact on how platforms treat freedom of expression, as I think they were intended to do; or they could be interpreted very broadly, and then anyone who thinks or who can claim to think that their content is democratically important or journalistic, even if it is clearly abusive and breaches the platform’s terms and conditions, would be able to claim that.

One option put forward by the Joint Committee is to introduce a public interest exemption, so that platforms would have to think about how they are treating content that is in the public interest. That would at least remove some of the concerns. The easiest way for platforms to interpret what is democratically important speech and what is journalistic speech is based on who the user is: are they a politician or political candidate, or are they a journalist? That risks them privileging certain people’s forms of speech over that of everyday users, even if that speech is in fact politically relevant. I think that having something that moves the threshold further away from focusing on who a user is as a proxy for whether their speech is likely to deserve extra protection would be a good start.

Kyle Taylor: It is basically just saying that content can somehow become less harmful depending on who says it. A systems-based approach is user-neutral, so its only metric is: does this potentially cause harm at scale? It does not matter who is saying it; it is simply a harm-based approach and a system solution. If you have exemptions, exceptions and exclusions, a system will not function. It suggests that a normal punter with six followers saying that the election was stolen is somehow more harmful than the President of the United States saying that an election is stolen. That is just the reality of how online systems work and how privileged and powerful users are more likely to cause harm.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q You are creating a two-tier internet, effectively, between the normal user and those who are exempt, which large swathes of people will be because it is so ambiguous. One of the other concerns that have been raised is the fact that the comments sections on newspaper websites are exempt from the Bill. Do you see an issue with that?

Ellen Judson: There is certainly an issue as that is often where we see a lot of abuse and harm, such that if that same content were replicated on a social media platform, it would almost certainly be within the scope of the Bill. There is a question, which is for Ofcom to consider in its risk profiles and risk registers, about where content at scale has the potential to cause the most harm. The reach of a small news outlet’s comments section would be much less than the reach of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, for instance. Certainly, if the risk assessments are done and comments sections of news websites have similar reach and scale and could cause significant harm, I think it would be reasonable for the regulator to consider that.

Kyle Taylor: It is also that they are publicly available. I can speak from personal experience. Just last week, there was a piece about me. The comments section simultaneously said that I should be at Nuremberg 2.0 because I was a Nazi, but also that I should be in a gas chamber. Hate perpetuates in a comments section just as it does on a social media platform. The idea that it is somehow less harmful because it is here and not there is inconsistent and incoherent with the regime where the clue is in the name: the Online Safety Bill. We are trying to make the online world safer.

On media I would add that we have to think about how easy it is, based on the criteria in the Bill, to become exempt as a media entity. We can think about that domestically, but what happens when a company is only meant to enforce their terms and conditions in that country, but can broadcast to the world? The UK could become the world’s disinformation laundromat because you can come here, meet the media exemption and then blast content to other places in the world. I do not think that is something that we are hoping to achieve through this Bill. We want to be the safest place in the world to go online and to set a global benchmark for what good regulation looks like.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q I suppose, yes. Under the current media carve-out, how do you see platforms being able to detect state actors that are quoting misinformation or perpetuating disinformation on their platforms?

Ellen Judson: I think it is a real challenge with the media exemptions, because it is a recognised tactic of state-based actors, state-aligned actors and non-state actors to use media platforms as ways to disseminate this information. If you can make a big enough story out of something, it gets into the media and that perpetuates the campaign of abuse, harassment and disinformation. If there are protections in place, it will not take disinformation actors very long to work out that if there are ways that they can get stories into the press, they are effectively covered.

In terms of platform enforceability, if platforms are asked to, for instance, look at their systems of amplification and what metrics they use to recommend or promote content to users, and to do that from a risk-based perspective and based on harm except when they are talking about media, it all becomes a bit fuzzy what a platform would actually be expected to do in terms of curating those sorts of content.

Kyle Taylor: As an example, Russia Today, until its broadcast licence was revoked about three months ago, would have qualified for the media exemption. Disinformation from Russia Today is not new; it has been spreading disinformation for years and years, and would have qualified for the media exemption until very recently.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q So as a result of these exemptions, the Bill as it stands could make the internet less safe than it currently is.

Kyle Taylor: The Bill as it stands could absolutely make the internet less safe than it currently is.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q You have done a really good job of explaining the concerns about journalistic content. Thinking about the rest of the Bill for a moment, do you think the balance between requiring the removal of content and the prioritisation of content is right? Do you think it will be different from how things are now? Do you think there is a better way it could be done in the Bill?

Ellen Judson: The focus at the moment is too heavily on content. There is a sort of tacit equation of content removal—sometimes content deprioritisation, but primarily content removal—as the way to protect users from harm, and as the threat to freedom of expression. That is where the tension comes in with how to manage both those things at once. What we would want from a Bill that was taking more of a systems approach is thinking: where are platforms making decisions about how they are designing their services, and how they are operating their services at all levels? Content moderation policy is certainly included, but it goes back to questions of how a recommendation algorithm is designed and trained, who is involved in that process, and how human moderators are trained and supported. It is also about what functionality users are given and what behaviour is incentivised and encouraged. There is a lot of mitigation that platforms can put in place that does not talk about directly affecting user content.

I think we should have risk assessments that focus on the risks of harms to users, as opposed to the risk of users encountering harmful content. Obviously there is a relationship, but one piece of content may have very different effects when it is encountered by different users. It may cause a lot of harm to one user, whereas it may not cause a lot of harm to another. We know that when certain kinds of content are scaled and amplified, and certain kinds of behaviour are encouraged or incentivised, we see harms at a scale that the Bill is trying to tackle. That is a concern for us. We want more of a focus on some things that are mentioned in the Bill—business models, platform algorithms, platform designs and systems and processes. They often take a backseat to the issues of content identification and removal.

Kyle Taylor: I will use the algorithm as an example, because this word flies around a lot when we talk about social media. An algorithm is a calculation that is learning from people’s behaviour. If society is racist, an algorithm will be racist. If society is white, an algorithm will be white. You can train an algorithm to do different things, but you have to remember that these companies are for-profit businesses that sell ad space. The only thing they are optimising for in an algorithm is engagement.

What we can do, as Ellen said, through a system is force optimisation around certain things, or drive algorithms away from certain types of content, but again, an algorithm is user-neutral. An algorithm does not care what user is saying what; it is just “What are people clicking on?”, regardless of what it is or who said it. An approach to safety has to follow the same methodology and say, “We are user-neutral. We are focused entirely on propensity to cause harm.”

The second piece is all the mitigation measures you can take once a post is up. There has been a real binary of “Leave it up” and “Take it down”, but there is a whole range of stuff—the most common word used is “friction”—to talk about what you can do with content once it is in the system. You have to say to yourself, “Okay, we absolutely must have free speech protections that exceed the platform’s current policies, because they are not implemented equally.” At the same time, you can preserve someone’s free expression by demonetising content to reduce the incentive of the company to push that content or user through its system. That is a way of achieving both a reduction in harm and the preservation of free expression.

Online Safety Bill

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is an honour to close this debate on behalf of the Opposition. Sadly, there is so little time for the debate that there is much that we will not even get to probe, including any mention of the Government’s underfunded and ill-thought-through online media strategy.

However, we all know that change and regulation of the online space are much needed, so Labour welcomes this legislation even in its delayed form. The current model, which sees social media platforms and tech giants making decisions about what content is hosted and shared online, is simply failing. It is about time that that model of self-regulation, which gives too much control to Silicon Valley, was challenged.

Therefore, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) said, Labour broadly supports the principles of the Bill and welcomes some aspects of the Government’s approach, including the duty of care frameworks and the introduction of an independent regulator, Ofcom. It cannot and should not be a matter for the Government of the time to control what people across the UK are able to access online. Labour will continue to work hard to ensure that Ofcom remains truly independent of political influence.

We must also acknowledge, however, that after significant delays this Bill is no longer world leading. The Government first announced their intention to regulate online spaces all the way back in 2018. Since then, the online space has remained unregulated and, in many cases, has perpetuated dangerous and harmful misinformation with real-world consequences. Colleagues will be aware of the sheer amount of coronavirus vaccine disinformation so easily accessed by millions online at the height of the pandemic. Indeed, in many respects, it was hard to avoid.

More recently, the devastating impact of state disinformation at the hands of Putin’s regime has been clearer than ever, almost two years after Parliament’s own Intelligence and Security Committee called Russian influence in the UK “the new normal”.

[Deidre Brock]

Does the hon. Lady share my disappointment and concern that the Bill does nothing to address misinformation and disinformation in political advertising? A rash of very aggressive campaign groups emerged before the last Scottish Parliament elections, for example; they spent heavily on online political advertising, but were not required to reveal their political ties or funding sources. That is surely not right.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I share the hon. Lady’s concern. There is so much more that is simply missing from this Bill, which is why it is just not good enough. We have heard in this debate about a range of omissions from the Bill and the loopholes that, despite the years of delay, have still not been addressed by the Government. I thank hon. Members on both sides of the House for pointing those out. It is a shame that we are not able to address them individually here, but we will probe those valued contributions further in the Bill Committee.

Despite huge public interest and a lengthy prelegislative scrutiny process, the Government continue to ignore many key recommendations, particularly around defining and regulating both illegal and legal but harmful content online. The very nature of the Bill and its heavy reliance on secondary legislation to truly flesh out the detail leaves much to be desired. We need to see action now if we are truly to keep people safe online.

Most importantly, this Bill is an opportunity, and an important one at that, to decide the kind of online world our children grow up in. I know from many across the House that growing up online as children do now is completely unimaginable. When I was young, we played Snake on a Nokia 3310, and had to wait for the dial-up and for people to get off the phone in order to go online and access MSN, but for people today access to the internet, social media and everything that brings is a fundamental part of their lives.

Once again, however, far too much detail, and the specifics of how this legislation will fundamentally change the user experience, is simply missing from the Bill. When it comes to harmful content that is not illegal, the Government have provided no detail. Despite the Bill’s being years in the making, we are no closer to understanding the impact it will have on users.

The Bill in its current draft has a huge focus on the tools for removing and moderating harmful content, rather than ensuring that design features are in place to make services systematically safer for all of us. The Government are thus at real risk of excluding children from being able to participate in the digital world freely and safely. The Bill must not lock children out of services they are entitled to use; instead, it must focus on making those services safe by design.

I will push the Minister on this particular point. We are all eager to hear what exact harms platforms will have to take steps to address and mitigate. Will it be self-harm? Will it perhaps be content promoting eating disorders, racism, homophobia, antisemitism and misogyny? One of the key problems with the Bill is the failure to make sure that the definitions of “legal but harmful” content are laid out within it. Will the Minister therefore commit to amending the Bill to address this and to allow for proper scrutiny? As we have heard, the Government have also completely failed to address what stakeholders term the problem of breadcrumbing. I would be grateful if the Minister outlined what steps the Government will be taking to address this issue, as there is clearly a loophole in the Bill that would allow this harmful practice to continue.

As we have heard, the gaps in the Bill, sadly, do not end there. Women and girls are disproportionately likely to be affected by online abuse and harassment. Online violence against women and girls is defined as including but not limited to

“intimate image abuse, online harassment, the sending of unsolicited explicit images, coercive ‘sexting’, and the creation and sharing of ‘deepfake’ pornography.”

This Bill is an important step forward but it will need significant strengthening to make online spaces safe for women and girls. While we welcome the steps by the Government to include cyber-flashing in the Bill, it must go further in other areas. Misogyny should be included as a harm to adults that online platforms have a duty to prevent from appearing on them. As colleagues will be aware, Instagram has been completely failing to tackle misogynistic abuse sent via direct message. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate has exposed what it terms an “epidemic of misogynistic abuse”, 90% of which has been completely and utterly ignored by Instagram, even when it has been reported to moderators. The Government must see sense and put violence against women and girls into the Bill, and it must also form a central pillar of regulation around legal but harmful content. Will the Minister therefore commit to at least outlining the definitions of “legal but harmful” content, both for adults and children, in the Bill?

Another major omission from the Bill in as currently drafted is its rather arbitrary categorisation of platforms based on size versus harm. As mentioned by many hon. Members, the categorisation system as it currently stands will completely fail to address some of the most extreme harms on the internet. Thanks to the fantastic work of organisations such as Hope not Hate and the Antisemitism Policy Trust, we know that smaller platforms such as 4chan and BitChute have significant numbers of users who are highly motivated to promote extremely dangerous content. The Minister must accept that his Department has been completely tone-deaf on this particular point, and—he must listen to what hon. Members have said today—its decision making utterly inexplicable. Rather than an arbitrary size cut-off, the regulator must instead use risk levels to determine which category a platform should fall into so that harmful and dangerous content does not slip through the net. Exactly when will the Minister’s Department publish more information on the detail around this categorisation system? Exactly what does he have to say to those people, including many Members here today, who have found themselves the victim of abusive content that has originated on these hate-driven smaller platforms? How will this Bill change their experience of being online? I will save him the energy, because we all know the real answer: it will do little to change the situation.

This Bill was once considered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve internet safety for good, and Labour wants to work with the Government to get this right. Part of our frustration is due to the way in which the Government have failed to factor technological change and advancement—which, as we all know, and as we have heard today, can be extremely rapid—into the workings of this Bill. While the Minister and I disagree on many things, I am sure that we are united in saying that no one can predict the future, and that is not where my frustrations lie. Instead, I feel that the Bill has failed to address issues that are developing right now—from developments in online gaming to the expansion of the metaverse. These are complicated concepts but they are also a reality that we as legislators must not shy away from.

The Government have repeatedly said that the Bill’s main objective is to protect children online, and of course it goes without saying that Labour supports that. Yet with the Bill being so restricted to user-to-user services, there are simply too many missed opportunities to deal with areas where children, and often adults, are likely to be at risk of harm. Online gaming is a space that is rightly innovative and fast-changing, but the rigid nature of how services have been categorised will soon mean that the Bill is outdated long before it has had a chance to have a positive impact. The same goes for the metaverse.

While of course Labour welcomes the Government’s commitment to prevent under-18s from accessing pornography online, the Minister must be realistic. A regime that seeks to ban rather than prevent is unlikely to ever be able to keep up with the creative, advanced nature of the tech industry. For that reason, I must press the Minister on exactly how this Bill will be sufficiently flexible and future-proofed to avoid a situation whereby it is outdated by the time it finally receives Royal Assent. We must make sure that we get this right, and the Government know that they could and can do more. I therefore look forward to the challenge and to working with colleagues across the House to strengthen this Bill throughout its passage.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

The Minister is well aware of the costs of delaying action to tackle problem gambling. When the Government’s long-awaited White Paper is finally published, it must go further to tackle issues with gambling licences, including those relating to the national lottery. In recent weeks, concerns have been raised about the Gambling Commission’s decision to award the new licence to a company with reported links to Gazprom. Given the extremely concerning situation in Ukraine, can the Minister confirm that he is confident that the new provider has no links to the Russian regime, and if so, why?

[Chris Philp]

As part of its licence awarding process, the Gambling Commission has a statutory obligation to ensure that anyone to whom it gives a licence meets the fit and proper person test. I have asked the commission to assure me that it has conducted thorough inquiries to establish that the provisional licence awardee meets the test, and it has given me that assurance. There are also arrangements for the proposed licence holder to undergo the UK secure vetting process, and that work will begin shortly.

Online Abuse

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I am very glad to respond to this important debate on behalf of the Opposition. It is also brilliant to serve under your chairmanship again, Sir Roger. I place on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for her excellent work on the Petitions Committee inquiry, for introducing both e-petitions and for outlining the issues facing us and why we desperately need the Online Safety Bill.

Clearly, there is a strong appetite among constituents across the UK for a change in regulation of the online space. The strength of feeling about the need to strengthen online protections is crystal clear. Colleagues across the House noted that this afternoon. I also pay tribute to the hard work of campaigners, including Katie Price, Emily Atack, Amy Hart and Bobby Norris, whom I was hoping to have with us today. They have called for action for some time now, along with so many others. As has been noted, the petitions have amassed more than 800,000 signatures—a significant number that cannot be ignored. It is abundantly clear that the Government must now take notice and, most importantly, take decisive action.

The experiences and stories shared in the debate bring a very human issue into sharp relief. As others have said, it is easy to get lost in technical language when speaking about internet regulation, so let me be clear: the Government can and should do more. The Conservatives promised that the Government would bring what was billed in their online harms White Paper as “world leading” legislation urgently to the forefront of the parliamentary agenda. Yet here we are, more than three years later, and we are still waiting.

Never has such legislation been more timely, given what we are seeing with the disinformation and misinformation being spread online about the appalling situation in, and the invasion of, Ukraine. All our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine and we stand in solidarity with them today.

The Government’s first attempt at a comprehensive draft online harms Bill was widely seen as too narrow, hard to follow and confusing in parts, and it was indeed in need of significant strengthening. That opinion was shared throughout the sector. The children’s charity the NSPCC conducted its own analysis and found that the first draft of the Bill failed in 10 of its 27 indicators for the protection of children. Those damning concerns were shared elsewhere. A 2021 study by the online safety group Internet Matters found that the 2 million most vulnerable children in Britain are seven times more likely to come to harm online than their peers across the globe. Of course, colleagues and, I am sure, the Minister will already know that.

The need for change and real regulation online has been well reported and the reality is that without robust change, more and more people will continue to suffer abuse at the hands of an unregulated internet. We need only to reflect on last summer and the England side’s success at the men’s UEFA Euros final to scratch the surface of the power of the internet to perpetuate hate and abuse. Although I know that colleagues will be aware that I am an immensely proud Welsh MP and will therefore always naturally believe that the Welsh side was utterly robbed of glory—not just then, but at the weekend, too—the Euros final was a hugely exciting time for all our country and the nation as a whole. However, despite the incredible work of the team and the pride and unity that those football matches brought to so many, their achievements were hugely tarnished by the utterly shocking abuse a number of players faced online following an impossibly difficult penalty shoot-out. It is beyond reprehensible that social media companies defended the use of a monkey emoji—we all know what was meant—saying that it was out of scope and could not be regulated because it was an emoji.

It is not just about the football last summer. Only this afternoon, I saw a great, brilliant and prominent black Welsh rugby player, Ashton Hewitt, reaching out and begging Twitter to block an anonymous troll with the username LladdPoblDduon. For the non-Welsh speakers in the room, that username literally translates as “killing black people”. How are people even allowed to create an account with that handle?

That is why the Labour party has long called for tougher penalties for those at the top of social media companies. Ofcom will take on some of the biggest tech firms in the world, with all the power and resources at their fingertips. It is a David and Goliath situation and Ofcom must have access to a full range of tools in its belt, including a provision to make top bosses criminally liable for persistently failing to tackle online harm. We all want to see effective and fit-for-purpose legislation that cracks down on harms and the hate and fake news that flourish online. I reach out to the Minister and to his Government—he has the cross-party support to ensure that that happens.

Labour believes that it is only by making senior social media executives personally liable for failures to prevent dangerous content from spreading, including that which glorifies violence, racism, antisemitism, homophobia or misogyny, that we will ensure that the social media companies begin to take it seriously. Instead of doing the right thing, the Government U-turned on the commitment for the Bill to have its Second Reading before Christmas.

The Minister knows that the scale of the problem is huge, yet despite years of warnings from Labour alongside campaigning groups and charities alike, the Government have persistently delayed robust action. The vast range of people, from young to old, being impacted by online trolls hiding behind anonymity is truly massive, and we heard powerful testimony from the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) about her experiences of suffering at the hands of anonymous trolls. It is a sad fact that women in public life see it as the norm that we are treated online as an easy target for abuse. By all means, debate my politics and my voting record, talk to me about my politics and my policies, but criticising my appearance, my accent, how I look and how I dress, just because I am a woman in public life, is completely unacceptable.

Although we welcome some of last week’s announcements, including the one that large social networks will be forced to let people filter out unverified accounts in an attempt to tackle anonymous abuse, there are still some gaping holes. They failed to address the back-of-house issues, especially those to do with illegal activity online. Moreover, the smaller social networks are yet to be factored in, as outlined by the Antisemitism Policy Trust.

The Government need to wake up and recognise that, sadly, when it comes to perpetuating hate, fake news or other negative behaviours online, the reality is that where there is a will, there is a way. The upcoming draft Online Safety Bill is a unique opportunity to put those wrongs right. That brings me to Labour’s key asks of the Minister this afternoon. I am keen to give the Minister plenty of time to respond, and we have that this afternoon, so I will keep my questions brief.

Given the urgency, and the devastation that an unregulated internet is having on users every day, will the Minister finally confirm exactly when this long-awaited legislation will be brought back to Parliament? We are looking for an exact date. Surely, given the long delays already incurred, giving clarification is the least that the Minister can do.

As I and others have already mentioned, anonymous abuse occurs not just on large platforms. In fact, some of the smaller platforms can be the most problematic in hosting, promoting and perpetuating abuse. Will the Minister confirm exactly how the upcoming legislation will ensure that the issues with smaller but high-harm platforms are also addressed?

I know that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) raised this point, and it is an issue that I am personally concerned about. The Minister recognises the horrifying content that is so easily accessed online by anyone with an internet connection. I welcome the Government’s recent commitment to introduce age-verification technology to prevent under-18s from accessing pornography online, but the Minister must also know that the technology is far more advanced than ever before. Only this week, the BBC reported the extremely disturbing story about the Metaverse app, which, in essence, allows children into virtual strip clubs online. A researcher was able to pose as a 13-year-old girl and quickly witnessed grooming, sexual material, racist insults and a rape threat in a virtual reality world. I encourage colleagues who are not familiar with the story to read up on it and see the graphics for themselves, because they are utterly shocking and appalling. It just cannot be right. It is all very well banning access to pornography, but Twitter has a minimum age threshold of 13 and fails to block pornographic content on its site. It is simply unfathomable that that is allowed to continue.

The internet is an inherently creative space and the legislation must keep up. How will the Minister ensure that the Bill is future-proofed, to prevent it from being out of date—the next generation of technology is already coming through—by the time it is finally put in place?

Lastly, I repeat the calls made by the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) and the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill. Labour firmly believes that the online space must be kept in check by an independent regulator, instead of by distant bodies in Silicon Valley. That is what is urgently needed, and what we have urgently needed for a long time. I hope that the Minister is listening.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

I thank my hon. Friend for the meeting that we recently attended. As I said, we will consider the impact of the whole set of proposals covered in the gambling White Paper, which will obviously have a number of effects on different bits of the economy. As I said at the meeting with the all-party parliamentary group on betting and gaming a few days ago, we want to ensure that nothing in the review undermines the status of horse-racing.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Delays to gambling reform cost about £647 million each year and the Government have failed to act. It is not good enough. Up to 1.4 million people are considered to be problem gamblers, so I am struggling to see why the Government continue to drag their feet when the need for reform is crystal clear. What is the Minister doing in advance of the long-awaited White Paper, because we need to address the issue now?

[Chris Philp]

All kinds of measures have been taken to address some of those very serious problems, which I completely recognise and accept. For example, a year or two ago, the use of credit cards to gamble online was banned. As we speak, the industry is in the process of developing a voluntary single customer view. A number of things have been done.

We are working, and have been working, on the Gambling Act review at pace and it will be published in the very near future. It is important to get it right, however, which is why we have taken the time to consult extensively and listen to stakeholders. I have met many hon. Members on both sides of the House to listen to their views too. It is very imminent because, as the hon. Lady says, large numbers of people are suffering serious harm, up to and including committing suicide. That is why it is important for the House to act on, I hope, a cross-party basis, broadly speaking, to sort it out.

Dormant Assets Bill [Lords]

Alex Davies-Jones Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

With this it will be convenient to consider Government amendments 1 and 2.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I rise to speak to new clause 1 in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith). As the Bill has moved through this House and the other place, I have been pleased by the progress that has been made, although there is still work to be done to ensure that dormant assets are distributed and governed effectively. Colleagues will be aware that the Bill will expand the current dormant assets scheme, which was first introduced by a Labour Government in 2008. The Government define dormant assets as a financial product, such as a bank account, that has not been used for many years and which the provider has been unable to reunite with its owner, despite efforts aligned with industry best practice.

In 2008, the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act was passed to provide a system to distribute dormant assets to good causes. Currently, 24 banks and building societies participate in the reclaim fund scheme, but Labour has always intended that the dormant assets scheme would broaden the financial products to which that legislation applies.

Although the Bill makes some progress and Labour supports the need for consultation, we urge that the scheme go much further. With the right safeguards in place to find the owners of assets, unclaimed winnings from gambling, pension assets and physical assets could be considered in the future, too. While I am grateful to the Minister for his frankness throughout the passage of this Bill, I must once again put on record that while Labour is generally supportive of the Bill, we urge that further consideration be given to incorporating pension assets into the scheme. While I recognise that the Minister has highlighted that occupational pension schemes and personal pension schemes whose owners were automatically enrolled are excluded, or out of scope of the Bill, I hope that in the future those assets will receive further consideration.

The core principles of any scheme must remain clear. Attempts should first be made to reunite assets with their rightful owners before transferring them. Owners should always be able to reclaim their funds, and participation must ultimately be voluntary. Labour is also clear that any funds released to the dormant assets scheme must not be used as a substitute for Government spending. We know that the increasing cost of living is impacting so many people across the country, and this Bill presents an important opportunity to release further funding and to put right some of the wrongs. On that point, I pay particular tribute to colleagues on the all-party parliamentary group for “left behind” neighbourhoods, who have been closely focused on the importance of dormant asset funding for vital community projects in the most left-behind parts of the country.

With that in mind, I place on record Labour’s thoughts on community wealth funds, which the Minister knows I feel passionately about. In the other place, Labour secured an amendment that would have allowed the Secretary of State to include community wealth funds as recipients of funding. That amendment had cross-party support and was generally welcomed by the sector. The aim of including community wealth funds as recipients of funding is clear. The designated money would be designed to go towards social infrastructure to further the wellbeing of communities suffering from high levels of deprivation. I was disappointed and also surprised that the Government chose to remove a measure aimed at empowering communities, which is also at the heart of the Government’s well-rehearsed levelling-up agenda. That said, I welcome the Minister’s collaborative and candid approach throughout the latter stages of this Bill, and Labour welcomes the Government’s commitment to including community wealth funds as part of the first round of consultations, as outlined in the Government’s amendment 2.

We must now make sure that momentum is not lost on that important development, as community wealth funds are central to reviving so many communities up and down the country. With that in mind, central to any spend is the importance of governance and sustainability in ensuring that funds of this nature are maintained and in good health.

The Minister knows, and I believe agrees, that scrutiny of the reclaim fund is vital. That is why we have tabled new clause 1. Recent events have highlighted the need for a transparent approach to decisions made in this place and the other place, and it is therefore vital that the Government are held to account on the health and governance of reclaim funds, especially in relation to the potential for insolvency.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I endorse entirely what my hon. Friend is saying. Does she agree, given the lack of confidence in some of the decision-making processes that the Government have undertaken before allocating funds, that it is all the more reason why new clause 1 would have real public confidence?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. Part of the reason we tabled new clause 1 is for openness and transparency, so that the public and this House can scrutinise exactly where this funding is being placed. Scrutiny is at the very heart of our jobs here in this place, and an annual report brought forward to Parliament, as new clause 1 stipulates, would be a crucial step forward.

Lastly, on Government amendment 1, I am pleased to see the clarification around collective scheme investments. It is vital that such investments remain eligible for incorporation into the reclaim fund. I hope to see further assets incorporated in the future, as I stipulated earlier.

Ultimately, Labour supports the Bill as our priority remains expanding the dormant assets scheme in line with our commitments first made in 2008. The programme so far has been extremely successful, and predictions suggest that expanding the scheme in such a way would identify about £3.7 billion of unclaimed assets, of which about £1.7 billion would be eligible for transfer to the reclaim fund. From that, £880 million would be repurposed for good causes across the UK. Labour supports that extremely welcome step, and I look forward to continuing to work with the Minister to tackle the challenges around extending the scheme to other assets. I hope that he will take on board our concerns about future governance of the fund, too.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I congratulate the Government on bringing forward the Bill. I recognise that, as the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) said, the release of dormant assets started with Labour and has been a cross-party achievement. My thanks, congratulations and appreciation also go to the financial institutions that have made the money available.

I am pleased with the Government’s proposals, including the consultation on the potential introduction of a community wealth fund. My congratulations and appreciation to the Minister for including that as a possibility, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) and the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) for their work in bringing that idea forward.

There are other great ideas—we could abolish personal debt by capitalising credit unions with this money or distribute it direct to community foundations in our constituencies—but I think that the community wealth fund is the best idea. I hope that we will see the money going into civil society and social infrastructure and into supporting the great levelling-up agenda to which the Government are committed. This is a tremendous Bill, and I very much support what the Government are doing.

--- Later in debate ---

Once again, I thank colleagues on both sides of the House for the constructive and collaborative debate today. For the reasons I have outlined, I ask that the House does not support new clause 1 and supports the Government amendments.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I wish to put on the record my thanks to hon. Members. I am encouraged by our collegiate debate, in stark contrast to the scenes on the Floor of the House earlier today. This evening’s debate shows that Parliament is at its best when we all work together across parties to deliver for our communities. More needs to be made of what we can do when we choose to work together.

As I mentioned, it was a Labour Government who first advanced legislation to place dormant assets from bank and building society accounts into the reclaim fund after significant efforts were made to contact the owners of those assets. For this reason, we are broadly supportive of the Bill and its main aims to expand the scheme. We therefore continue to welcome attempts to incorporate a commitment to community wealth funds, which have the potential to support communities across the nation that have been left behind in recent years.

The Minister knows that Labour Members outlined our concerns at length in Committee and on Report, and my colleagues and I made particular reference to some of the flaws in the Bill that we ultimately sought to correct. It is therefore somewhat disappointing that our concerns on the health and governance of the reclaim fund have not been taken on board, particularly as transparency and scrutiny are such essential facets of our work in this place.

In Committee, the Minister argued that Reclaim Fund Ltd is

“responsible for determining the appropriate proportion of funding that it can prudently release… The amount that RFL reserves for future repayment claims is…based on actuarial modelling and assessment of…risk factors, following guidance from the Financial Conduct Authority.”––[Official Report, Dormant Assets Public Bill Committee, 11 January 2022; c. 34-35.]

Of course, independence from the Government is vital but it is also important that the Secretary of State makes a regular assessment if this fund is to be available for future generations. I sincerely hope the Minister will take on board our concerns and discuss with the Secretary of State, who is in her place, and departmental colleagues the potential for an annual report, which would be extremely beneficial for those who rely on funds from this important scheme.

Although Labour supports the Bill, we believe the Government have missed several opportunities. I urge the Secretary of State to speed up the timetable to allow for these much-needed funds to reach the communities that need them most. I look forward to closely following the development of the first public consultation. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 12

Transfer of eligible client money to reclaim fund

Amendment made: 1, page 12, line 9, at end insert—

“(4A) The reference in subsection (4)(b) to money that could be transferred as mentioned in section 8(1)(a) includes money held by an investment institution that is not within the definition in section 8(3) which—

(a) is proceeds of the conversion by the investment institution of a collective scheme investment into a right to payment of an amount, and

(b) could, if it were held by an investment institution falling within section 8(3), be transferred as mentioned in section 8(1)(a).”—(Craig Mackinlay.)

This amendment clarifies that money held by an investment institution not within clause 8(3) is not client money if it is the proceeds of a conversion to cash of a collective scheme investment and would be capable of being transferred to a reclaim fund if the holder was an investment institution within clause 8(3).

Clause 29

Distribution of dormant assets money for meeting English expenditure

Amendment made: 2, page 22, line 21, at end insert—

“(3A) In carrying out the first public consultation under subsection (3)(a) the Secretary of State must invite views as to whether the permitted distributions should be, or include, any one or more of the following—

(a) distributions for the purpose of the provision of services, facilities or opportunities to meet the needs of young people;

(b) distributions for the purpose of the development of individuals’ ability to manage their finances or the improvement of access to personal financial services;

(c) distributions to social investment wholesalers (within the meaning of section 18);

(d) distributions to community wealth funds.

(3B) For the purposes of subsection (3A) “community wealth fund” means a fund which gives long term financial support (whether directly or indirectly) for the provision of local amenities or other social infrastructure.”—(Craig Mackinlay.)

This amendment requires the first public consultation under section 18A to include the options of permitting the English dormant asset money distributions currently permitted by section 18(1) and distributions to community wealth funds, whether or not in addition to other permitted purposes or recipients.

Bill read the Third time and passed, with amendments.

Business of the House

Ordered,

That, at this day’s sitting, the Speaker shall put the Questions necessary to dispose of proceedings on the motion in the name of Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg relating to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority not later than one hour after the commencement of proceedings on the motion for this Order; such Questions shall include the Questions on any Amendments selected by the Speaker which may then be moved; proceedings may continue, though opposed, until any hour, and may be entered upon after the moment of interruption; and Standing Order No. 41A (Deferred divisions) shall not apply.—(Craig Mackinlay.)