Online Safety Bill

Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very thankful to be in this House to discuss this Bill. I know many Lords have commented on the Bill being rather late but, being a relatively new Peer, I am pleased to be able to contribute to this debate—it is something I have been active on, in another place, for quite some time. So I congratulate the Minister on bringing the Bill to the House.

Everything that a person sees on social media is there as a result of a decision taken by the platform that runs it—a point very powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—and we have heard the tragic outworking of that for children in this debate. In an article in the Daily Telegraph on 13 December last year, it was reported that Meta knew it was prompting content harmful to teenagers—that was in an internal document leaked to CBS News. It suggested that Meta knew Instagram was pushing girls toward dangerous content.

I will not repeat the many valuable points that have been made on the safety of children—I support them all and will be supporting the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—but I want to make a number of further points, some of which are unfortunately born from personal experience, somewhat like those the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, made earlier. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by abuse online. While I do acknowledge the user empowerment duties in Clause 12 and the triple lock, I am concerned that the Government’s proposals do not go far enough to protect women and girls. They put an onus on individual users to protects themselves, and while the individual can choose to opt out, it does not protect millions of others from being able to see the content.

As well as fearing for vulnerable women and girls who see such content, I am concerned at the chill factor to women and girls getting involved in public life. Many potential political candidates have said to me that they could not go through what I endure online, and so they do not. That is not good for democracy and not good for encouraging women to come forward. Therefore, I support the proposal to produce a code of practice on violence against women and girls modelled on Carnegie UK’s previous work on hate speech, and that it should be introduced as an amendment to Clause 36. I thank Carnegie UK for its work, over a long period of time, on these issues.

Additionally, it has to be said that some of the trolling against politicians and people who speak out on issues is undoubtedly orchestrated. I hope that that level of orchestration by vicious online mobs—the pile-on that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, referred to—can be looked into as well. I hope the Minister will be cognisant of that point.

I am pleased that anonymity has been raised in the Chamber this evening. The argument goes that if everyone had to be identified and verified online, this would prevent whistleblowers and others, such as the victims of violence, coming forward and speaking out, so they need anonymity. I understand that argument but, given that the majority of abuse and criminal activity comes from anonymous accounts, surely there could be a way to protect genuine free speech users from those who overstep the line and threaten violence. I believe this could be achieved by platforms holding the ID of users behind a firewall that could be breached only if there were reasonable grounds to suspect that a criminal offence had been committed. There are those who use anonymity as a cloak of protection from criminal law. That needs to be challenged. I recognise that this is a cross-jurisdictional issue. However, it is one we need to tackle in this House.

Finally, I support and endorse the amendments being brought forward by the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, on those under 18 accessing pornography, particularly on robust age verification and a clear definition of pornographic content. I commend the work of the noble Lord and the coalition of NGOs that have been working with him. I thank them for their clear papers on this issue.

I support the principle of the Bill, but we will have a lot of work to do to strengthen it. I look forward to taking part in that.