Online Safety Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Kim Leadbeater and Caroline Ansell

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

[Kim Leadbeater]

Thank you.

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

Q May I ask about anonymity? It is mentioned in the Bill, but only once. Do you think there is a need for more expansive coverage of this issue? Do you think people should be able to use the internet while remaining anonymous, and if not, to whom would users disclose their identity? Would it be to the platform, or would it be more publicly than that?

Stephen Kinsella: There are a few questions there, obviously. I should say that we are happy with the approach in the Bill. We always felt that focusing on anonymity was the wrong place to start. Instead, we thought that a positive right to be verified, and then a right to screen out replies and posts from unverified accounts, was the way to go.

In terms of who one should make the disclosure to, or who would provide the verification, our concern was always that we did not want to provide another trove of data that the platforms could use to target us with adverts and otherwise monetise. While we have tried to be agnostic on the solution—again, we welcome the approach in the Bill, which is more about principles and systems than trying to pick outcomes—there are third-party providers out there that could provide one-stop verification. Some of them, for instance, rely on the open banking principles. The good thing about the banks is that under law, under the payment services directive and others, we are the owners of our own data. It is a much greyer area whether we are the owners of the data that the social media platforms hold on us, so using that data that the banks have—there is a solution called One ID, for instance—they will provide verification, and you could then use that to open your social media accounts without having to give that data to the platforms.

I saw in the evidence given to you on Tuesday that it was claimed that 80% of users are reluctant to give their data to platforms. We were surprised by that, and so we looked at it. They chose their words carefully. They said users were reluctant to give their data to “certain websites”. What they meant was porn sites. In the polling they were referring to, the question was specifically about willingness to share data with porn sites, and people are, understandably, reluctant to do that. When using open banking or other systems, there are good third-party providers, I would suggest, for verification.

Online Safety Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Kim Leadbeater and Caroline Ansell

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

[Caroline Ansell]

Q Eva, there is just one reference to anonymity in the Bill currently. Do you think there is an opportunity to express a fuller, more settled opinion and potentially expand on that juxtaposition?

Eva Hartshorn-Sanders: I heard the advice that the representative of the Information Commissioner’s Office gave earlier—he feels that the balance is right at the moment. It is important to incorporate freedom of speech and privacy within this framework in a democratic country. I do not think we need to add anything more than that.

[Kim Leadbeater]

Q Thank you to the witnesses for joining us this afternoon. May I ask for your views on the clauses on journalistic content exemption and democratic content exemption? Do you think that these measures are likely to be effective?

Poppy Wood: I know you have spoken a lot about this over the past few days, but the content of democratic importance clause is a layer of the Bill that makes the Bill very complicated and hard to implement. My concern about these layers of free speech—whether it is the journalistic exemption, the news media exemption or the content of democratic importance clause—is that, as you heard from the tech companies, they just do not really know what to do with it. What we need is a Bill that can be implemented, so I would definitely err on the side of paring back the Bill so that it is easy to understand and clear. We should revisit anything that causes confusion or is obscure.

The clause on content of democratic importance is highly problematic—not just because it makes the Bill hard to implement and we are asking the platforms to decide what democratic speech is, but because I think it will become a gateway for the sorts of co-ordinated disinformation that we spoke about earlier. Covid disinformation for the past two years would easily have been a matter of public policy, and I think the platforms, because of this clause, would have said, “Well, if someone’s telling you to drink hydroxychloroquine as a cure for covid, we can’t touch that now, because it’s content of democratic importance.”

I have another example. In 2018, Facebook said that it had identified and taken down a Facebook page called “Free Scotland 2014”. In 2018—four years later—Facebook identified it. It was a Russian/Iranian-backed page that was promoting falsehoods in support of Scottish independence using fake news websites, with articles about the Queen and Prince Philip wanting to give themselves a pay rise by stealing from the poor. It was total nonsense, but that is easily content of democratic importance. Even though it was backed by fake actors—as we have said, I do not think there is anything in the Bill to preclude that at the moment, or at least to get the companies to focus on it—in 2014, that content would have been content of democratic importance, and the platforms took four years to take it down.

I think this clause would mean that that stuff became legitimate. It would be a major loophole for hate and disinformation. The best thing to do is to take that clause out completely. Clause 15(3) talks about content of democratic importance applying to speech across a diverse range of political opinion. Take that line in that subsection and put it in the freedom of expression clause—clause 19. What you then have is a really beefed-up freedom of expression clause that talks about political diversity, but you do not have layers on top of it that mean bad actors can promote hate and disinformation. I would say that is a solution, and that will make the Bill much easier to implement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kim Leadbeater]

Q Thank you. You alluded earlier to the fact that the Bill contains duties to protect content of democratic importance and journalistic content. What is your view on those measures and their likely effectiveness?

Frances Haugen: I want to reiterate that AI struggles to do even really basic tasks. For example, Facebook’s own document said that it only took down 0.8% of violence-inciting content. Let us look at a much broader category, such as content of democratic importance—if you include that in the Bill, I guarantee you that the platforms will come back to you and say that they have no idea how to implement the Bill. There is no chance that AI will do a good job of identifying content of democratic importance at any point in the next 30 years.

The second question is about carve-outs for media. At a minimum, we need to greatly tighten the standards for what counts as a publication. Right now, I could get together with a friend and start a blog and, as citizen journalists, get the exact same protections as an established, thoughtful, well-staffed publication with an editorial board and other forms of accountability. Time and again, we have seen countries such as Russia use small media outlets as part of their misinformation and disinformation strategies. At a minimum, we need to really tighten that standard.

We have even seen situations where they will use very established publications, such as CNN. They will take an article that says, “Ukrainians destroyed a bunch of Russian tanks,” and intentionally have their bot networks spread that out. They will just paste the link and say, “Russia destroyed a bunch of tanks.” People briefly glance at the snippet, they see the picture of the tank, they see “CNN”, and they think, “Ah, Russia is winning.” We need to remember that even real media outlets can be abused by our enemies to manipulate the public.

[Caroline Ansell]

Q Good afternoon, Frances. I want to ask you about anonymity and striking a balance. We have heard variously that anonymity affords some users safe engagement and actually reduces harm, while for others anonymity has been seen to fuel abuse. How do you see the balance, and how do you see the Bill striving to achieve that?

Frances Haugen: It is important for people to understand what anonymity really is and what it would really mean to have confirmed identities. Platforms already have a huge amount of data on their users. We bleed information about ourselves on to these platforms. It is not about whether the platforms could identify people to the authorities; it is that they choose not to do that.

Secondly, if we did, say, mandate IDs, platforms would have two choices. The first would be to require IDs, so that every single user on their platform would have to have an ID that is verifiable via a computer database—you would have to show your ID and the platform would confirm it off the computer. Platforms would suddenly lose users in many countries around the world that do not have well-integrated computerised databases. The platforms will come back to you and say that they cannot lose a third or half of their users. As long as they are allowed to have users from countries that do not have those levels of sophisticated systems, users in the UK will just use VPNs—a kind of software that allows you to kind of teleport to a different place in the world—and pretend to be users from those other places. Things such as ID identification are not very effective.

Lastly, we need to remember that there is a lot of nuance in things like encryption and anonymity. As a whistleblower, I believe there is a vital need for having access to private communications, but I believe we need to view these things in context. There is a huge difference between, say, Signal, which is open source and anyone in the world can read the code for it—the US Department of Defence only endorses Signal for its employees, because it knows exactly what is being used—and something like Messenger. Messenger is very different, because we have no idea how it actually works. Facebook says, “We use this protocol,” but we cannot see the code; we have no idea. It is the same for Telegram; it is a private company with dubious connections.

If people think that they are safe and anonymous, but they are not actually anonymous, they can put themselves at a lot of risk. The secondary thing is that when we have anonymity in context with more sensitive data—for example, Instagram and Facebook act like directories for finding children—that is a very different context for having anonymity and privacy from something like Signal, where you have to know someone’s phone number in order to contact them.

These things are not cut-and-dried, black-or-white issues. I think it is difficult to have mandatory identity. I think it is really important to have privacy. We have to view them in context.