Online Safety Bill

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome the Bill and the opportunity it presents, if it is strengthened, to address the many online harms which have been so eloquently outlined by colleagues around the Chamber. My starting point is ensuring that we do all we can to minimise the harms to those at risk of, or with, eating disorders. I declare an interest as the mother of a young adult daughter with anorexia, which is, as many noble Lords will know, the deadliest of any of the mental health diseases.

The evidence is clear of the harm that online content can do to people at risk of, or with, eating disorders and to exacerbate their conditions. Beat, the leading eating disorder charity, undertook research last year of 255 people with lived experience of eating disorders and their carers, which found that 91% of people with lived experience of eating disorders have encountered content which was harmful to their eating disorder condition. This includes sites that are innocuously called “pro-ana” and “pro-mia”, which encourage extreme starvation and extreme bulimic behaviours by people, and content for which there is no warning if you see an image or a video of body checking or of people being fed by naso-gastric tubes, as though that were something to be applauded.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said, there are images which have been digitally enhanced to present pictures of people’s bodies that are completely unrealistic but are not labelled as digitally retouched—unlike in France, where the law states that those commercial images do have to be if digitally retouched. It was good that the celebrity influencer Kylie Jenner, who may not be known to all noble Lords in this place, was called out last week in the media for digitally editing pictures of her body on social media. That is the right thing to do and this Government should be doing more on that, including in the Bill.

It is not just that those images are out there. Other noble Lords have made the point that there are algorithms which constantly pump them at people. People with eating disorders feel bombarded by a constant stream of triggering images, content and advertising which feeds eating disorder behaviours and conditions. Obviously, you can recover from eating disorders; that is good news for those of us who know sufferers. But having talked to my daughter Rose about it, I know that what happens on TikTok is that your feed page—I think it is called a “for you” page—obviously is based on the content you have been looking at over the last period. It will suck you back down into an eating disorder, just when those people with mental disorders are trying to get out. For the reasons given so well by other noble Members, algorithms need to be touched on.

I fully support what the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, said about the insufficiency of the protections for adults. I cannot get my daughter to put food in her mouth to nourish her; how on earth am I going to get her or other vulnerable people to opt out in a different way from the social media content which is harming them?

It was excellent that Vicky Ford promoted this issue in the other place, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, mentioned. She had some suggestions about ensuring that eating disorders were treated on a par and that the obligations on social media companies applied regarding those disorders. I support that entirely and hope that I can work with other Members from around the House to ensure that we can shut that loophole down, so that people with eating disorders, and their carers, are given another tool in the fight against these vicious and deadly diseases.