My Lords, I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, has given us an opportunity to talk about transparency reports with these amendments, which are potentially a helpful addition to the Bill. Transparency is one of
the huge benefits that the legislation may bring. One of the concerns that the public have and that politicians have always had with online platforms is that they appear to be a black box—you cannot see what is going on in them.
In the entire edifice that we are constructing in the Online Safety Bill, there are huge opportunities to change that. The platforms will have to do risk assessments —there are measures in the Bill to make sure that information about these is put out—and they will have to take active steps to mitigate any risks they find. Again, we may get directions and guidance from Ofcom that will explain to the public exactly what is expected of them. The final piece of the jigsaw is the transparency reports that show the outcomes—how a platform has performed and what it has done to meet its obligations in dealing with content and behaviour on its services.
For the record, I previously worked for one of the platforms, and I would have said that I was on the pro-transparency wing of the transparency party inside the company. I believed that it was in the platform’s interest: if you do not tell people what you are doing, they will make things up about you, and what they make up will generally be worse than what you are actually doing. So there are huge advantages to the platforms from being transparent.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, has picked up on some important points in his Amendment 160B, which talks about making sure that the transparency report is not counterproductive by giving the bad guys information that they could use to ill effect. That is a valid point; it is often debated inside the platforms. Sometimes, I argued furiously with my colleagues in the platforms about why we should disclose information. They would ask, “What about the bad guys?” Sometimes I challenged that, but other times it would have been a genuine and accurate concern. The noble Lord mentioned things such as child sexual abuse material, and we have to recognise that the bad guys are incredibly devious and creative, and if you show them anything that they can use against you to get around your systems, they will try to do that. That is a genuine and valid concern.
The sort of thing that you might put into a transparency report is, for example, whether you have banned particular organisations. I would be in favour of indicating to the public that an organisation is banned, but you can see that the potential impact of that is that all the people you are concerned about would create another organisation with a different name and then get back on to your platform. We need to be alive to those kinds of concerns.
It is also relevant to Amendment 165 and the terms of service that the more granular and detailed your terms of service are, the better they are for public information, but there are opportunities to get around them. Again, we would have that argument internally. I would say, “If we are prohibiting specific hate speech terms, tell people that, and then they won’t use them”. For me, that would be a success, as they are not using those hate speech terms anymore, but, of course, they may then find alternative hate speech terms that they can use instead. You are facing that battle all the time. That is a genuine concern that I hope we will be able
to debate. I hope that Ofcom will be able to mitigate that risk by discussing with platforms what these transparency reports should look like. In a sense, we are doing a risk assessment of the transparency report process.
Amendment 229 on effectiveness is really interesting. My experience was that if you did not have a transparency report, you were under huge pressure to produce one and that once you produced one, nobody was interested. For fear of embarrassing anyone in the Committee, I would be curious to know how many noble Lords participating in this debate have read the transparency reports already produced by Meta Platforms, Google and others. If they have not read them, they should not be embarrassed, because my experience was that I would talk to regulators and politicians about something they had asked me to come in to talk about, such as hate speech or child sexual abuse material, and I learned to print off the transparency report. I would go in and say, “Well, you know what we are doing; it’s in our transparency report”. They would ask, “What transparency report?”, and I would have to show them. So, having produced a transparency report, every time we published it, we would expect there to be public interest, but little use was made of it. That is not a reason not to do them—as I said, I am very much in favour of doing them—but, on their own, they may not be effective, and Amendment 229 touches on that.
I was trying to think of a collective noun for transparency reports and, seeing as they shed light, I think it may be a “chandelier”. Where we may get the real benefit is if Ofcom can produce a chandelier of transparency reports, taking all the information it gets from the different platforms, processing it and selecting the most relevant information—the reports are often too long for people to work their way through—so that it can enable comparisons. That is really good and it is quite good for the industry that people know that platform A did this, platform B did that, and platform C did something else. They will take note of that, compare with each other and want to get into the best category. It is also critical that Ofcom puts this into user-friendly language, and Ofcom has quite a good record of producing intelligible reports. In the context of Amendment 229, a review process is good. One of the things that might come out of that, thinking ahead, would be Ofcom’s role in producing meta transparency reports, the chandelier that will shed light on what the whole sector is doing.