A turning point in protecting children from online harm
I have long been working in Parliament to introduce much stronger rules for social media platforms and other sites as part of the Online Safety Bill. These new rules are designed to prevent children from seeing illegal or adult content, and to ensure that tech companies take their new responsibilities far more seriously than has been the case.
I am confident that the new rules mark a turning point in protecting children from what most would agree is harmful and dangerous content.
Amongst the new rules I've been campaigning for, and which are now accepted by Parliament are:
- age verification requirements for sites that host adult content
- making more types of harmful content illegal on sites that are accessed by children
- creating new criminal offences for tech bosses who fail to enforce the new rules effectively.
I am delighted that I and, and others, have been able to persuade Parliament and the Government to introduce these much stronger rules to keep children safe online.
Parents across the country have been trying their best, but they are not in any position to take on the power of the massive tech companies - so I'm reassured that these new rules will help keep children safe from online harm.
I spoke in the final debate of the Bill, where I welcomed the amendments that the Government has made to the Bill, as you can read below:
Online Safety Bill | Tuesday 12 September 2023
I will follow on from the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), who talked powerfully about the impact of online pornography, particularly on children who see it.
Sadly, online pornography is increasingly violent. Many videos depict graphic and degrading abuse of women, sickening acts of rape and incest, and many underage participants. I also want to refer to the excellent study by the Children’s Commissioner, which revealed that the average age at which children first encounter pornography online is just 13 years old, and that there are 1.4 million visits to pornography sites by British children each and every month. As my right hon. Friend said, that is rewiring children’s brains in respect of what they think about sex, what they expect during sex and what they think girls want during sex. I think we will all look back on this widespread child exposure to pornography in a similar way to how we look back on children working down mines or being condemned to the poor house. Future generations will wonder how on earth we abandoned our children to online pornography.
Ending the ready availability of pornographic content to children and criminalising those who fail to protect them should surely be the most important goal of the Online Safety Bill. Indeed, that was most of the aim of part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which was never enacted. Without the Government amendments tabled in the Lords last week, which I strongly support, the Online Safety Bill would have been in danger of missing this opportunity. As my colleagues have done, I want to thank the Secretary of State and Ministers for their engagement in what has been a cross-party campaign both in this place and the other place, with Baroness Kidron and Lord Bethell leading the way, along with charities and the campaigning journalist Charles Hymas at The Daily Telegraph, who did a fantastic job of reporting it all so powerfully. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has taught me all I ever needed to know about how to negotiate with Government.
We now have these brilliantly strengthening amendments, including, significantly, an amendment that will criminalise directors and managers if they do not comply with Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to specific child safety duties. That is really important, because we are talking about the wealthiest companies in the world. Just having fines will not be enough to generate the kind of culture change at board level that we need. Only potential jail terms, which have worked in the construction industry and the financial services industry, will do what it takes.
Lords amendments 141 and 142 make pornography a primary priority harm for children. Importantly, user-to-user providers, as well as dedicated adult sites, will now be explicitly required to use highly effective age verification tools to prevent children accessing them. The wording “highly effective” is crucial, because porn is porn wherever it is found, whether on Twitter, which as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said is the most likely place for children to find pornography, or on dedicated adult sites. It has the same effect and causes the same harm. It is therefore vital that tech companies will actually have to prevent children from going on their sites, and not just try hard. That is an incredibly important amendment.
Sir William Cash
Does my hon. Friend agree that what has really put their teeth on edge most of all is the idea that they might go to prison?
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My hon. Friend is completely right. The impact of not taking responsibility for protecting children has to go to the very top.
Lords amendment 105 would compel Ofcom to submit its draft codes of practice within 18 months. That is an improvement on the previously lax timescale, which I welcome—along with the other significant improvements that have been made—and I repeat my gratitude to the Minister and the Secretary of State. Let us not pretend, however, that on Royal Assent our children will suddenly be safe from online pornography or any other online harms. There are serious questions to be asked about Ofcom’s capabilities to enforce against non-compliant porn sites, and I think we should look again at part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which would have allowed the British Board of Film Classification to act as the regulator.
Ian Paisley
I congratulate the hon. Lady on the excellent efforts she has made over a long period to highlight these matters. Does she agree that this is not the end but only the beginning of the first days of ensuring that we have proper digital access protection for not only children but adults who have access to digital devices?
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I thank the hon. Gentleman for his support. What he says is entirely correct.
The key to this does, of course, lie in the implementation. One of the capabilities of the BBFC is to disrupt the business model and the payment provision of the adult online industry. I ask the Minister to consider whether he can direct Ofcom to examine the way in which the BBFC deals with offline and streamed pornography, and whether Ofcom could learn some lessons from that. There is still a disparity between the kind of pornography that is allowed offline, on DVD or streamed services, and the kind that appears online. Offline, certain acts are illegal and the BBFC will not classify the content: any act that looks non-consensual, for example, is illegal and the material cannot be distributed, whereas online it proliferates.
The Bill should have been the perfect vehicle to expand those rules to all online services offering pornographic content. Sadly, we have missed that opportunity, but I nevertheless welcome the Government’s recently announced porn review. I hope it can be used to close the online/offline gap, to insert verification checks for people appearing in pornographic videos and to deal with related offences. Many of those people did not consent and do not know that they are in the videos.
We also need to take account of the complete lack of moderation on some of the sites. It was recently revealed in a court case in the United States that 700,000 Pornhub sites had been flagged for illegal content, but had not been checked. Pornhub has managed to check just 50 videos a day, and has acknowledged that unless a video has been flagged more than 15 times for potential criminal content, such as child rape, it will not even join the queue to be moderated and potentially taken down. The children and the trafficked women who appear in those videos are seeing their abuse repeated millions of times with no ability to pull it down.
The Bill has been controversial, and many of the arguments have concerned issues of free speech. I am a supporter of free speech, but violent pornography is not free speech. Drawing children into addiction is not free speech. Knowingly allowing children to view horrific sex crimes is not free speech. Publishing and profiting from videos of children being raped is not free speech. It is sickening, it is evil, it is destructive and it is a crime, and it is a crime from which too many profit with impunity. A third of the internet consists of pornography. The global porn industry’s revenue is estimated to be as much as $97 billion.
The Bill is an important step forward, but we would be naive to expect this Goliath of an industry to roll over and keep children safe.
There is much more to be done which will require international co-operation, co-operation from financial institutions, and Governments who are prepared to stand their ground against the might of these vested interests. I very much hope that this one will.
