My Lords, for once I want to be really positive. I am actually very positive about this whole group of amendments because more transparency is essential in what we are discussing. I especially like Amendment 165 from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, because it is around terms of service for user-to-user services and ensures that information can be sought on the scope as well as the application. This is important because so much has been put on user-to-user services as well as on terms of service. You need to know what is going on.
I want particularly to compliment Amendment 229 that says that transparency reports should be
“of sufficient quality to enable service users and researchers to make informed judgements”,
et cetera. That is a very elegant way in which to say that they should not be gobbledegook. If we are going to have them, they should be clear and of a quality that we can read. Obviously, we do not want them to be unreadable and full of jargon and legalistic language. I am hoping that that is the requirement.
5 pm
I am positive because I have been worried that so much depends on terms of service and how that can lead to the overremoval of content and, as we discussed the other day, there is no individual complaints mechanism in terms of Ofcom. So I am grasping for ways in which users can have a right of redress. Understanding why something has been taken down is very important. As the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, said, so much is hidden from users. People will constantly say, “My material has been deboosted”, and it might well have been. They will say things such as, “The algorithms are hiding content, even if they are not removing it”. I have noticed that people can get very paranoid, and it can fuel conspiracy theories because you get people saying, “Nobody has retweeted my tweet. This is a deboosting algorithm”, when actually they have not retweeted it because it was boring. If you could see a bit more clearly what the policies were instead of feeling that they are hidden from your view, it would lessen the paranoia and that kind of accusation.
My only caveat to this proposal relates to what the noble Lord, Lord Allan, said about the bad guys being banned and that, if they are banned, they might emerge somewhere else. We also need to recognise that sometimes people who are called the bad guys can be banned, and they are not the bad guys. They need to be able to say, “We’re not the bad guys”. That is why the more detail, the better. The only other caveat is that I do not want to be in a situation where we demand endless regulatory complexity and reports and impositions make life impossible for the services in terms of red tape and paperwork. That is my only caveat. Generally speaking, however, I am very positive about these amendments, and I hope that by Report they become, one way or another, part of the Bill.