My Lords, I had to miss a few sessions of the Committee but I am now back until the end. I remind fellow Members of my interests: I worked for one of the largest platforms for a decade, but I have no current interests. It is all in the register if people care to look. I want to contribute to this debate on the basis of that experience of having worked inside the platforms.
I start by agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. The thrust of their amendments—the idea that something will be needed here—is entirely correct. We have created in the Online Safety Bill a mechanism that we in this Committee know is intended primarily to focus on systems and how Ofcom regulates them, but what the public out there hear is that we are creating a mechanism that will meet their concerns—and their concerns will not end with systems. As the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, eloquently described, their concerns in some instances will be about specific cases and the question will be: who will take those up?
If there is no other mechanism and no way to signpost people to a place where they can seek redress, they will come to Ofcom. That is something we do not want. We want Ofcom to be focused on the big-ticket items of dealing with systems, not bogged down in
dealing with thousands of individual complaints. So we can anticipate a situation in which we will need someone to be able to deal with those individual complaints.
I want to focus on making that workable, because the volume challenge might not be as people expect. I have seen from having worked on the inside that there is a vast funnel of reports, where people report content to platforms. Most of those reports are spurious or vexatious; that is the reality. Platforms have made their reporting systems easy, as we want them to do —indeed, in the Bill we say, “Make sure you have really easy-to-use reporting systems”—but one feature of that is that people will use them simply to express a view. Over the last couple of weeks, all the platforms will have been inundated with literally millions of reports about Turkish politicians. These will come from the supporters of either side, reporting people on the other side—claiming that they are engaged in hate speech or pornography or whatever. They will use whatever tool they can. That is what we used to see day in, day out: football teams or political groups that report each other. The challenge is to separate out the signal—the genuinely serious reports of where something is going wrong—from the vast amount of noise, of people simply using the reporting system because they can. For the ombudsman, the challenge will be that signal question.
Breaking that down, from the vast funnel of complaints coming in, we have a smaller subset that are actionable. Some of those will be substantive, real complaints, where the individual simply disagrees with the decision. That could be primarily for two reasons. The first is that the platform has made a bad decision and failed to enforce its own policies. For example, you reported something as being pornographic, and it obviously was, but the operator was having a bad day—they were tired, it was late in the day and they pressed “Leave up” instead of “Take down”. That happens on a regular basis, and 1% of errors like that across a huge volume means a lot of mistakes being made. Those kinds of issues, where there is a simple operator error, should get picked up by the platforms’ own appeal mechanisms. That is what they are there for, and the Bill rightly points to that. A second reviewer should look at it. Hopefully they are a bit fresher, understand that a mistake was made and can simply reverse it. Those operator error reports can be dealt with internally.
The second type would be where the platform enforces policies correctly but, from the complainant’s point of view, the policies are wrong. It may be a more pro-free speech platform where the person says, “This is hate speech”, but the platform says, “Well, according to our rules, it is not. Under our terms of service, we permit robust speech of this kind. Another platform might not, but we do”. In that case, the complainant is still unhappy but the platform has done nothing wrong—unless the policies the platform is enforcing are out of step with the requirements under the Online Safety Bill, in which case the complaint should properly come to Ofcom. Based on the individual complaint, a complainant may have something material for Ofcom. They are saying that they believe the platform’s policies and systems are not in line with the guidance issued by Ofcom—whether on hate speech, pornography or anything else. That second category of complaint would come to Ofcom.
The third class concerns the kind of complaint that the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, described. In some ways, this is the hardest. The platform has correctly enforced its policies but, in a particular case, the effect is deeply unfair, problematic and harmful for an individual. The platform simply says, “Look, we enforced the policies. They are there. This piece of content did not violate them”. Any outsider looking at it would say, “There is an injustice here. We can clearly see that an individual is being harmed. A similar piece of content might not be harmful to another individual, but to this individual it is”. In those circumstances, groups such as the South West Grid for Learning, with which I work frequently, perform an invaluable task. We should recognise that there is a network of non-governmental organisations in the United Kingdom that do this day in, day out. Groups such as the Internet Watch Foundation and many others have fantastic relations and connections with the platforms and regularly bring exceptional cases to them.