Online Safety Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of 5Rights Foundation and the Digital Futures Commission, my positions at Oxford and LSE and at the UN Broadband Commission and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as deputy chair of the APPG on digital regulation and as a member of the Joint Committee on this Bill.

As has already been mentioned, on Monday I hosted the saddest of events, at which Ian Russell and Merry Varney, the Russell family’s solicitor, showed parliamentarians images and posts that had been algorithmically recommended to Molly in the lead-up to her death. These were images so horrible that they cannot be shown in the media, so numerous that we could see only a fraction, and so full of despair and violence that many of the adult professionals involved in the inquest had to seek counselling. Yet in court, much of this material was defended by two tech companies as being suitable for a 14 year-old. Something has gone terribly wrong. The question is: is this Bill sufficient to fix it?

At the heart of our debates should not be content but the power of algorithms that shape our experiences online. Those algorithms could be designed for any number of purposes, including offering a less toxic digital environment, but they are instead fixed on ranking, nudging, promoting and amplifying anything to keep our attention, whatever the societal cost. It does not need to be like that. Nothing about the digital world is a given; it is 100% engineered and almost all privately owned; it can be designed for any outcome. Now is the time to end the era of tech exceptionality and to mandate a level of product safety so that the sector, just like any other sector, does not put its users at foreseeable risk of harm. As Meta’s corporate advertising adorning bus stops across the capital says:

“The metaverse may be virtual, but the impact will be real.”


I very much welcome the Bill, but there are still matters to discuss. The Government have chosen to take out many of the protections for adults, which raises questions about the value and practicality of what remains. In Committee, it will be important to understand how enforcement of a raft of new offences will be resourced and to question the oversight and efficacy of the remaining adult provisions. Relying primarily on companies to be author, judge and jury of their own terms of service may well be a race to the bottom.

I regret that Parliament has been denied the proper opportunity to determine what kind of online world we want for adults, which, I believe, we will regret as technology enters its next phase of intelligence and automation. However, my particular concern is the fate of children, whose well-being is collateral damage to a profitable business model. Changes to the Bill will mean that child safety duties are no longer an add-on to a generally safer world; they are now the first and only line of defence. I have given the Secretary of State sight of my amendments, and I inform the House that they are not probing amendments; they are necessary to fill the gaps and loopholes in the Bill as it now stands. In short, we need to ensure that child safety duties apply to all services likely to be accessed by children. We must ensure the quality control of all age-assurance systems. Age checking must not focus on a particular harm, but on the child; it needs to be secure, privacy-preserving and proportionate, and it must work. The children’s risk assessment and the list of harms must cover each of the four Cs: content harm, conduct harm, contact harm and commercial harm, such as the recommendation loops of violence and self-hatred that push thousands of children into states of misery. Those harms must be in the Bill.

Coroners and bereaved parents must have access to data relevant to the death of a child to end the current inhumane arrangement whereby bereaved families facing the devasting loss of their child are forced to battle, unsuccessfully, with tech behemoths for years. I hope that the Minister will reiterate commitments made in the other place to close that loophole.

Children’s rights must be in the Bill. An unintended consequence of removing protections for adults is that children will now cost companies vastly more developer time, more content moderation and more legal costs than adults. The digital world is the organising technology of our society, and children need to be online for their education and information to participate in civic society—they must not be kicked out.

I thank all those who have indicated their support, and the Secretary of State, the Minister and officials for the considerable time they have given me. However, I ask the Minister to listen very carefully to the mood of the House this evening; the matters I have raised are desperately urgent and long-promised, and must now be delivered unequivocally.

While millions of children suffer from the negative effects of the online world, some pay with their lives. I am a proud supporter of a group of bereaved parents for online safety, and I put on the record that we remember Molly, Frankie, Olly, Breck, Sophie and all the others who have lost their lives. I hope that the whole House will join me in not resting until we have a Bill fit for their memory.