My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, clearly, transparency is absolutely one of the crucial elements of the Bill. Indeed, it was another important aspect of the Joint Committee’s report. Like the noble Lord, Lord Knight—a fellow traveller on the committee—and many other noble Lords, I much prefer the reach of Amendments 233 and 234, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, to Amendment 230, the lead amendment in this group.
We strongly support amendments that aim to introduce a duty for regulated platforms to enable access by approved independent researchers to information and data from regulated services, under certain conditions. Of course, there are arguments for speeding up the process under Clause 146, but this is really important because companies themselves currently decide who accesses data, how much of it and for what purposes. Only the companies can see the full picture, and the effect of this is that it has taken years to build a really solid case for this Online Safety Bill. Without a greater level of insight, enabling quality research and harm analysis, policy-making and regulatory innovation will not move forward.
I was very much taken by what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, had to say about the future in terms of the speeding up of technological developments in AI, which inevitably will make the opening up of data, and research into it, of greater and greater importance. Of course, I also take extremely seriously my noble friend’s points about the need for data protection. We are very cognisant of the lessons of Cambridge Analytica, as he mentioned.
It is always worth reading the columns of the noble Lord, Lord Hague. He highlighted this issue last December, in the Times. He said:
“Social media companies should be required to make anonymised data available to third-party researchers to study the effect of their policies. Crucially, the algorithms that determine what you see—the news you are fed, the videos you are shown, the people you meet on a website—should not only be revealed to regulators but the choices made in crafting them should then be open to public scrutiny and debate”.
Those were very wise words. The status quo leaves transparency in the hands of big tech companies with a vested interest in opacity. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, mentioned Twitter announcing in February that it would cease allowing free research access to its application programming interface. It is on a whim that a billionaire owner can decide to deny access to researchers.
I much prefer Amendment 233, which would enable Ofcom to appoint an approved independent researcher. The Ofcom code of practice proposed in Amendment 234 would be issued for researchers and platforms, setting out the procedures for enabling access to data. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about who should be an independent accredited researcher, but I hope that that is exactly the kind of thing that a code of practice would deal with.
Just as a little contrast, Article 40 of the EU’s Digital Services Act gives access to data to a broad range of researchers—this has been mentioned previously—including civil society and non-profit organisations dedicated to public interest research. The DSA sets out in detail the framework for vetting and access procedures, creating an explicit role for new independent supervisory authorities. This is an example that we could easily follow.
The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, mentioned the whole question of skilled persons. Like him, I do not believe that this measure is adequate as a substitute for what is contained in Amendments 233 and 234. It will be a useful tool for Ofcom to access external expertise on a case-by-case basis but it will not provide for what might be described as a wider ecosystem of inspection and analysis.
The noble Lord also mentioned the fact that internet companies should not regard themselves as an exception. Independent scrutiny is a cornerstone of the pharmaceutical, car, oil, gas and finance industries. They are open to scrutiny from research; we should expect that for social media as well. Independent researchers are already given access in many other circumstances.
The case for these amendments has been made extremely well. I very much hope to see the Government, with the much more open approach that they are demonstrating today, accept the value of these amendments.