My Lords, what an unusually reticent group we have here for this group of amendments. I had never thought of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, as being like Don Quixote, but she certainly seems to be tilting at windmills tonight.
I go back to the Joint Committee report, because what we said there is relevant. We said:
“Anonymous abuse online is a serious area of concern that the Bill needs to do more to address. The core safety objectives apply to anonymous accounts as much as identifiable ones. At the same time, anonymity and pseudonymity are crucial to online safety for marginalised groups, for whistleblowers, and for victims of domestic abuse and other forms of offline violence. Anonymity and pseudonymity themselves are not the problem and ending them would not be a proportionate response”.
We were very clear; the Government’s response on this was pretty clear too.
We said:
“The problems are a lack of traceability by law enforcement, the frictionless creation and disposal of accounts at scale, a lack of user control over the types of accounts they engage with and a failure of online platforms to deal comprehensively with abuse on their platforms”.
We said there should be:
“A requirement for the largest and highest risk platforms to offer the choice of verified or unverified status and user options on how they interact with accounts in either category”.
Crucially for these amendments, we said:
“We recommend that the Code of Practice also sets out clear minimum standards to ensure identification processes used for verification protect people’s privacy—including from repressive regimes or those that outlaw homosexuality”.
We were very clear about the difference between stripping away anonymity and ensuring that verification was available where the user wanted to engage only with those who had verified themselves. Requiring platforms to allow users—
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