My Lords, I will speak briefly as I know that we are waiting for a Statement.
If you talk to colleagues who know a great deal about the harm that is happening and the way in which platforms operate, as well as to colleagues who talk directly to the platforms, one thing that you commonly hear from them is a phrase that often recurs when they talk to senior people about some of the problems here: “I never thought of that before”. That is whether it is about favourites on Snapchat, which cause grief in friendship groups, about the fact that, when somebody leaves a WhatsApp group, it flags up who that person is—who wants to be seen as the person who took the decision to leave?—or about the fact that a child is recommended to other children even if the company does not know whether they are remotely similar.
If you are 13, you are introduced as a boy to Andrew Tate; if you are a girl, you might be introduced to a set of girls who may or may not share anorexia content, but they dog-whistle and blog. The companies are not deliberately orchestrating these outcomes—it is the way they are designed that is causing those consequences—but, at the moment, they take no responsibility for what is happening. We need to reflect on that.
I turn briefly to a meeting that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and I were at yesterday afternoon, which leads neatly on to some of the comments the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made, a few moments ago about the far right. The meeting was convened by Luke Pollard MP and was on the strange world known as the manosphere, which is the world of incels—involuntary celibates. As your Lordships may be aware, on various occasions, certain individuals who identify as that have committed murder and other crimes. It is a very strange world.
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I was introduced to two terms that I was not aware of. If you are an incel, you refer to males who are fortunate enough to get on well with ladies as Chads, and ladies who are fortunate enough to get on well with men or boys are apparently known as Stacys. That was something I did not particularly want to learn, but I did. This was the second meeting that Luke Pollard had convened; the people at that meeting were from a huge variety of groups and they all said
that it is the only forum they have found in United Kingdom that is pulling all these different elements together. They are acutely aware of how much of a problem this is, and they find that forum incredibly helpful, because nobody else is doing it.
I have asked some of the people gave evidence in that meeting to forward some of their concerns to us, which the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and I would like to forward to the Minister and the Bill team. I raise this so as to encourage the Minister to understand the scale of this, what is happening and its effects and then to look at how harms are defined in the Bill and how functionality is looked at, to see whether this live, growing area is dealt with effectively by the Bill.
This takes me into the area of media literacy, which I flag so that the Minister and the Bill team can do some homework. In Scotland, there is a very sensible scheme called Mentors in Violence Prevention. Essentially, it uses the older pupils in the sixth form, who have learned beforehand from other mentors how to talk about and understand the harms they might experience online. They deliver to the younger children the information that they have accumulated. The evidence is that this is infinitely more effective than teachers or outside experts doing it. It is almost peer-to-peer—perhaps a very appropriate approach for your Lordships’ House.