My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. I absolutely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said right at the beginning of her speech. This was one of the most difficult areas that the Joint Committee had to look at. I am not saying that anything that we said was particularly original. We tried to say that this issue could be partly addressed by greater media literacy, which, no doubt, we will be talking about later today; we talked about transparency of system design, and about better enforcement of service terms and conditions. But things have moved on. Clearly, many of us think that the way that the current Bill is drafted is inadequate. However, the Government did move towards proposing a committee to review misinformation and disinformation. That is welcome, but I believe that these amendments are taking the thinking and actions a step forward.
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I do not agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. What she has been saying is really a counsel of despair on not being able to deal with misinformation and
disinformation. I was really interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, had to say about his experience —this is pretty difficult stuff to tackle when you are in a position of that sort. I support the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Healy, in what they had to say about this particular aspect. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, it is about the system and the amplification that takes place, which brings out the worst in humanity.
The Puttnam report, by the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee, also raised this. If Lord Puttnam had not retired from this House, he would be here today, saying that we need to do a lot more about this than we are proposing even in the amendments. In the report, the committee talked about a pandemic of misinformation. Nowhere is that more apparent than in health. The report was prescient; it came out in June 2020, some three years ago, well before we heard and saw all kinds of disinformation about vaccines.
We are seeing increasing numbers of commentators talking about the impact of misinformation and disinformation. We have had Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, talking about the dangers to democracy. We have heard Sir Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, saying that the main threat from AI is disinformation. We have had some really powerful statements, quite apart from seeing the impact of disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms.
On these Benches, we believe that the Government have a responsibility to intervene on misinformation and to support legislation to stop the spread of fake news. I believe that the public have an expectation that the Government do that and that the large social media companies address this issue on their platforms, hence my support for the amendments in these groups.
It has to be balanced. That is why I support the amendments by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, as well. We have a common interest in trying to make sure that, while preventing misinformation and disinformation, we do it in a proportional way, as he described. That is of great importance.
The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, did not quote at length from the letter from Full Fact and all the health professionals, but, notably, it says:
“One key way that we can protect the future of our healthcare system is to ensure that internet companies have clear policies on how they identify the harmful health misinformation that appears on their platforms, as well as consistent approaches in dealing with it”.
It is powerful testimony from some very experienced and senior health professionals.
The focus of many of these amendments is on the way that the advisory committee will operate. Having an independent chair is of great importance, as is having a time limit within which there must be a report, along with other aspects.
The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred in one of the amendments to addressing the opacity of existing government methods for tackling disinformation. He mentioned one unit, but there are three units that I have been briefed about. There is the counter-disinformation unit in DCMS, which addresses mainly
Covid issues that breach companies’ terms of service, and, recently, Russia/Ukraine issues. Then we have the Government Information Cell, which is based in the FCDO, and the rapid response unit, which I think he referred to, in the Cabinet Office. Ministers referred to these and said that the principal focus of the DCMS unit during the pandemic was Covid et cetera, but we do not know very much about what these units do or what their criteria are. Do they have any relationship with Ofcom? Will they have a relationship with Ofcom? It is important that we have something that reduces that level of opacity and opens up what those units do to a greater degree of scrutiny.
The only direct reference to misinformation in the Bill as it stands is to the advisory committee, so it is important that we know how it fits in with Ofcom’s wider regulatory functions, and that there is a duty to create a code of practice on information and misinformation. The advisory committee should be creative in the way it operates. One of the difficult issues we found is that there is not a great deal of knowledge out there about how to tackle misinformation and disinformation in a systemic way.
Finally, I was very interested in the briefing that noble Lords probably all received from Adobe, which talked about the Content Authenticity Initiative. That is exactly the kind of thing the advisory committee should be exploring. Apparently, it has more than 1,000 members, including media and tech companies, NGOs and so on. Its ambition is to promote the adoption of an open industry standard for content authenticity and provenance. That may sound like the holy grail, but it is something we should be trying to work towards.
These amendments are a means of at least groping towards a better way of tackling misinformation and disinformation, which, as we have heard, can have a huge impact, particularly in health.