My Lords, I want to focus primarily on the safeguarding of children. I support the general provisions and intent of this Bill; it is clearly going to be a very important tool in keeping children safe online.
While the internet has so many benefits, it exposes children to myriad harmful content, such as pornography and content promoting self-harm and suicide, as well as targeted abuse and grooming. Molly Russell’s name has become synonymous with the Bill, and it is important that we get this legislation right so that harms online, such as those Molly encountered, are not just reduced but eliminated. We need to make the online world as safe as it can be for our children.
We know that young children are able to sign up for accounts on social media platforms with little or no protection from the harms they face; they are able to freely access pornography without restriction. It is shocking that over 60% of children under 13 have accessed harmful content online by accident. To safeguard children and young people thoroughly, we need to ensure that the protections for children offline are mirrored online. I fully endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said and I will be supporting him in the amendments he brings forward. I also support those that will be brought forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron.
In the offline sphere, under the Video Recordings Act, the British Board of Film Classification, for example, is responsible for classifying pornographic content to ensure that it is not only not illegal but meets established standards. None of these offline standards is applied online at all.
The online pornography industry has developed and evolved without any—never mind robust—regulatory oversight. But, given what is available online, much of which is illegal, oversight is greatly needed and overdue. The Bill provides the opportunity to put that right, and we must not miss this opportunity because, as we have heard, this may not return for some years.
Age verification was supposed to be implemented under the Digital Economy Act. As a result of the Government’s decision not to implement Part 3 of that Act, children have had unfettered access to pornographic content. Therefore, in my view, age verification needs to be implemented as swiftly as possible. A coalition of charities are proposing that Ofcom must prepare and issue a code of practice within four months of Royal Assent and that age verification should be implemented within six months. That is the very minimum that we should expect. We owe it to our children that they are not exposed to any more harm than they have been already.
Much of the debate in the other place on the issue of free speech focused on the Bill’s provisions to regulate what is legal but harmful. It is important that we ensure that the provisions of this Bill protect free speech, while at the same time protecting vulnerable people against deeply damaging material and content. The Bill now places a duty on user-to-user services
“to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law”.
We need to examine the operation of this duty very carefully. The Bill must reflect the principle and the law must reflect the principle that whatever you can say offline on the street should be protected online. Large internet companies should not have the power to decide what is said and not said online. If a company removes speech that would be legal offline, it must be placed under an obligation to give reasons why that speech was removed and be held to the highest standard of accountability for removing it.
Social media companies are enormous cartels that dominate our culture. The Government, in bringing forward this Bill, have concluded that they cannot be trusted with users’ safety. They cannot be trusted to keep their platforms safe, and equally they should not be trusted with free speech. I want also to endorse those noble Lords and Baronesses who have called for action to be taken against the awful abuse and trolling of women and girls online, and particularly the use of anonymous accounts. This issue needs to be tackled, and I look forward to working with others in Committee to strengthen the Bill in all these safeguards.
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