My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, in her very moving and personal speech. I am sorry that I was unable to speak to the previous group of amendments, some of which were in my name, because, due to unavoidable business in my diocese, I was not able to be present when that debate began late last Tuesday. However, it is very good to be able to support this group of amendments, and I hope tangentially to say something also in favour of risk assessment, although I am conscious that other noble Lords have ably made many of the points that I was going to make.
My right reverend friend the Bishop of Gloucester has added her name in support of amendments in this group, and I also associate myself with them—she is not able to be here today. As has been said, we are all aware that reaching the threshold of 18 does not somehow award you with exponentially different discernment capabilities, nor wrap those more vulnerable teenagers in some impermeable cotton wool to protect them from harm.
We are united, I think, in wanting to do all we can to make the online space feel safe and be safe for all. However, there is increasing evidence that people do not believe that it is. The DCMS’s own Public Attitudes to Digital Regulation survey is concerning. The most recent data shows that the number of UK adults who do not feel safe and secure online increased from 38% in November/December 2021 to 45% in June/July 2022. If that trend increases, the number will soon pass half, with more than half of UK adults not feeling safe and secure online.
It is vital that we protect society’s most vulnerable. When people are vulnerable through mental illness or other challenges, they are surely not able to protect themselves from being exposed to damaging online content by making safe choices, as we have just heard. In making this an opt-in system, we would save lives when people are at a point of crisis.
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In listening to our debates, I sometimes feel that we have not grasped in our deliberations as a Committee the inequality of arms which exists in an individual faced with the entire internet. We have heard analogies this afternoon of a bookshop, and we might think of a supermarket. We might also think of a debate in the Athenian Agora many years ago, when people debated person to person, with an equality of arms and intellect. There is no such equality of arms when it comes to exposure to the internet and social media. I will categorise five things which break this equality down—they all begin with “A”, if your Lordships like alliteration.
The first is advertising. The whole expertise of the advertising industry, commercially driven through applications, places its weight on the individual. The accumulated skill of how to sell more to more people is focused and channelled through all the social media we are concerned with regulating.
The second is access. Through the mobile phone in the 19 year-old’s pocket, and in mine, social media and app producers have access 24/7, in the most private and intimate moments of our lives, to influence and shape our minds. There is no physical boundary of going to a bookshop; it is present wherever we are.
The third “A” is access to our data. The people who are pushing things at us know more about us than the closest members of our families, because they study every purchase. Every click is interpreted. Every inquiry that we search is channelled back into access to our data and used to pressure the individual and to shape their choices in the offline world as well as the online one.
Fourthly, all this information and skill is then channelled algorithmically and driven by the power of algorithms. It is multiplied, and multiplied again, in ways that no consumer fully understands or can measure.
Fifthly, we are now on the threshold of much of the content to which we and others are exposed being energised and powered by artificial intelligence, so that the problems we have seen to date are multiplying and will be multiplied hugely in the coming decade.
I believe that people will look back on the first two decades of the 21st century—the time that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred to, from 2003, when we did not envisage what was coming, to this Bill in 2023—as a time of complete madness. They will see it as a time when we created such harmful, toxic environments—not only for children and young people but for adults—that it affected the mental health of a generation profoundly. This Bill is an opportunity to draw a line in the sand and to remedy that. The user empowerment tools and adult risk assessments offer us very important tools. We must take this opportunity and fight back against this inequality of arms. I support these amendments.