I am very grateful to the noble Lords who have spoken on the amendments in this group, both this afternoon and last Tuesday evening. As this is a continuation of that debate, I think my noble friend Lord Moylan is technically correct still to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, a happy birthday, at least in procedural terms.
We have had a very valuable debate over both days on the Bill’s approach to holding platforms accountable to their users. Amendments 33B, 41A, 43ZA, 138A and 194A in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Lipsey and Lord McNally, and Amendment 154 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, seek to bring back the concept of legal but harmful content and related adult risk assessments. They reintroduce obligations for companies to consider the risk of harm associated with legal content accessed by adults. As noble Lords have noted, the provisions in the Bill to this effect were removed in another place, after careful consideration, to protect freedom of expression online. In particular, the Government listened to concerns that the previous legal but harmful provisions could create incentives for companies to remove legal content from their services.
In place of adult risk assessments, we introduced new duties on category 1 services to enable users themselves to understand how these platforms treat different types of content, as set out in Clauses 64 and 65. In particular, this will allow Ofcom to hold them to account when they do not follow through on their promises regarding content they say that they prohibit or to which they say that they restrict access. Major platforms already prohibit much of the content listed in Clause 12, but these terms of service are often opaque and not consistently enforced. The Bill will address and change that.
I would also like to respond to concerns raised through Amendments 41A and 43ZA, which seek to ensure that the user empowerment categories cover the most harmful categories of content to adults. I reassure noble Lords that the user empowerment list reflects input from a wide range of interested parties about the areas of greatest concern to users. Platforms already have strong commercial incentives to tackle harmful content. The major technology companies already prohibit most types of harmful and abusive content. It is clear that most users do not want to see that sort of content and most advertisers do not want their products advertised alongside it. Clause 12 sets out that providers must offer user empowerment tools with a specified list of content to the extent that it is proportionate to do so. This will be based on the size or capacity of the service as well as the likelihood that adult users will
encounter the listed content. Providers will therefore need internally to assess the likelihood that users will encounter the content. If Ofcom disagrees with the assessment that a provider has made, it will have the ability to request information from providers for the purpose of assessing compliance.
Amendments 44 and 158, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, seek to place new duties on providers of category 1 services to produce an assessment of their compliance with the transparency, accountability, freedom of expression and user empowerment duties as set out in Clauses 12, 64 and 65 and to share their assessments with Ofcom. I am sympathetic to the aim of ensuring that Ofcom can effectively assess companies’ compliance with these duties. But these amendments would enable providers to mark their own homework when it comes to their compliance with the duties in question. The Bill has been designed to ensure that Ofcom has responsibility for assessing compliance and that it can obtain sufficient information from all regulated services to make judgments about compliance with their duties. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, asked about this—and I think the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, is about to.