argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am honoured to have been appointed the Minister responsible for the Online Safety Bill. Having worked on these issues for a number of years, I am well aware of the urgency and importance of this legislation, in particular to protect children and tackle criminal activity online—that is why we are discussing this legislation Relative to the point of order from my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), I have the greatest respect for him and his standing in this House, but it feels like we have been discussing this Bill for at least five years. We have had a Green Paper and a White Paper. We had a pre-legislative scrutiny process, which I was honoured to be asked to chair. We have had reports from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee and from other Select Committees and all-party parliamentary groups of this House. This legislation does not want for scrutiny We have also had a highly collaborative and iterative process in the discussion of the Bill. We have had 66 Government acceptances of recommendations made by the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill. We have had Government amendments in Committee. We are discusssing Government amendments today and we have Government commitments to table amendments in the House of Lords. The Bill has received a huge amount of consultation. It is highly important legislation, and the victims of online crime, online fraud, bullying and harassment want to see us get the Bill into the Lords and on the statute book as quickly as possible.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. and learned Lady makes a very important point. The legislation sets regulatory thresholds at the criminal law level based on existing offences in law. Many of the points she made are covered by existing public law offences, particularly in regards to discriminating against people based on their protected characteristics. As she well knows, the internet is a reserved matter, so the legal threshold is set at where UK law stands, but where law may differ in Scotland, the police authorities in Scotland can still take action against individuals in breach of the law.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): The right hon. Lady makes a very important point. There have to be minimum safety standards, and I think that was also reflected in the report of the Joint Committee, which I chaired. Those minimum legal standards are set where the criminal law is set for these priority legal offences. A company may have higher terms of service—it may operate at a higher level—in which case it will be judged on the operation of its terms of service. However, for priority illegal content, it cannot have a code of practice that is below the legal threshold, and it would be in breach of the provisions if it did. For priority illegal offences, the minimum threshold is set by the law.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): It was a pleasure to serve alongside the hon. Lady on the Joint Committee. There are clear new offences relating to knowingly false information that will cause harm. As she will know, that was a Law Commission recommendation; it was not in the draft Bill but it is now in the Bill. The Government have also said that as a consequence of the new National Security Bill, which is going through Parliament, we will bring in a new priority offence relating to disinformation spread by hostile foreign states. As she knows, one of the most common areas for organised disinformation has been at state level. As a consequence of the new national security legislation, that will also be reflected in schedule 7 of this Bill, and that is a welcome change The Bill requires all services to take robust action to tackle the spread of illegal content and activity. Providers must proactively reduce the risk on their services of illegal activity and the sharing of illegal content, and they must identify and remove illegal content once it appears on their services. That is a proactive responsibility. We have tabled several interrelated amendments to reinforce the principle that companies must take a safety-by-design approach to managing the risk of illegal content and activity on their services. These amendments require platforms to assess the risk of their services being used to commit, or to facilitate the commission of, a priority offence and then to design and operate their services to mitigate that risk. This will ensure that companies put in place preventive measures to mitigate a broad spectrum of factors that enable illegal activity, rather than focusing solely on the removal of illegal content once it appears.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Henry Edward Millar Smith (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate my hon. Friend on his appointment to his position. On harmful content, there are all too many appalling examples of animal abuse on the internet. What are the Government’s thoughts on how we can mitigate such harmful content, which is facilitating wildlife crime? Might similar online protections be provided for animals to the ones that clause 53 sets out for children?
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Caroline Julia Dinenage (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate my hon. Friend on taking his new position; we rarely have a new Minister so capable of hitting the ground running. He makes a crucial point about clearness and transparency for both users and the social media providers and other platforms, because it is important that we make sure they are 100% clear about what is expected of them and the penalties for not fulfilling their commitments. Does he agree that opaqueness—a veil of secrecy—has been one of the obstacles, and that a whole raft of content has been taken down for the wrong reasons while other content has been left to proliferate because of the lack of clarity?
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): That is entirely right, and in closing I say that the Bill does what we have always asked for it to do: it gives absolute clarity that illegal things offline must be illegal online as well, and be regulated online. It establishes clear responsibilities and liabilities for the platforms to do that proactively. It enables a regulator to hold the platforms to account on their ability to tackle those priority illegal harms and provide transparency on other areas of harmful content. At present we simply do not know about the policy decisions that companies choose to make: we have no say in it; it is not transparent; we do not know whether they do it. The Bill will deliver in those important regards. If we are serious about tackling issues such as fraud and abuse online, and other criminal offences, we require a regulatory system to do that and proper legal accountability and liability for the companies. That is what the Bill and the further amendments deliver.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): As I said, a company may be asked to address this, which means that it has to set out what its policies are, how it would deal with that content and its terms of service. The Bill does not require a company to remove legal speech that it has no desire to remove. The regulator cannot insist on that, nor can the Government or the Bill. There is nothing to make legal speech online illegal.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): I think that the codes of practice establish what we expect the response of companies to be when dealing with priority illegal harm. We would expect the regulator to apply those methods consistently. If my hon. Friend fears that that is no longer the case, I shall be happy to meet him to discuss the matter.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): If there is any area of doubt, I shall be happy to follow it up, but, as I said earlier, I think we would expect that if the regulator establishes through the codes of practice how a company will respond proactively to identify illegal priority content on its platform, it is inherent that that will be done consistently. We would accept the same approach as part of that process. As I have said, I shall be happy to meet my hon. Friend and discuss any gaps in the process that he thinks may exist, but that is what we expect the outcome to be.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Government Operations
Chris Ian Brian Mynott Philp (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments. I merely observe that the "consistency" requirements were written into the Bill, and, as far as I can see, are not there now. Perhaps we could discuss it further in correspondence Let me turn briefly to clause 40 and the various amendments to it—amendments 44, 45, 13, 46 and others—and the remarks made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), about the Secretary of State’s powers. I intervened on the hon. Lady earlier on this subject. It also arose in Committee, when she and many others made important points on whether the powers in clause 40 went too far and whether they impinged reasonably on the independence of the regulator, in this case Ofcom. I welcome the commitments made in the written ministerial statement laid last Thursday—coincidentally shortly after my departure—that there will be amendments in the Lords to circumscribe the circumstances in which the Secretary of State can exercise those powers to exceptional circumstances. I heard the point made by the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire that it was unclear what "exceptional" meant. The term has a relatively well defined meaning in law, but the commitment in the WMS goes further and says that the bases upon which the power can be exercised will be specified and limited to certain matters such as public health or matters concerning international relations. That will severely limit the circumstances in which those powers can be used, and I think it would be unreasonable to expect Ofcom, as a telecommunications regulator, to have expertise in those other areas that I have just mentioned. I think that the narrowing is reasonable, for the reasons that I have set out.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Government Operations
Julian Carlton Knight (Conservative, Centre-right): Those areas are still incredibly broad and open to interpretation. Would it not be easier just to remove the Secretary of State from the process and allow this place to take directly from Ofcom the code of standards that we are talking about so that it can be debated fully in the House?
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Chris Ian Brian Mynott Philp (Conservative, Centre-right): The Government are often in possession of information—for example, security information relating to the UK intelligence community—that Ofcom, as the proposer of a code or a revised code, may not be in possession of. So the ability of the Secretary of State to propose amendments in those narrow fields, based on information that only the Government have access to, is not wholly unreasonable. My hon. Friend will obviously comment further on this in his speech, and no doubt the other place will give anxious scrutiny to the question as well I welcome the architecture in new clause 14 in so far as it relates to the definition of illegal content; that is a helpful clarification. I would also like to draw the House’s attention to amendment 16 to clause 9, which makes it clear that acts that are concerned with the commission of a criminal offence or the facilitation of a criminal offence will also trigger the definitions. That is a very welcome widening I do not want to try the House’s patience by making too long a speech, given how much the House has heard from me already on this topic, but there are two areas where, as far as I can see, there are no amendments down but which others who scrutinise this later, particularly in the other place, might want to consider. These are areas that I was minded to look at a bit more over the summer. No doubt it will be a relief to some people that I will not be around to do so. The first of the two areas that might bear more thought is clause 137, which talks about giving academic researchers access to social media platforms. I was struck by Frances Haugen’s evidence on this. The current approach in the Bill is for Ofcom to do a report that will takes two years, and I wonder if there could be a way of speeding that up slightly The second area concerns the operation of algorithms promoting harmful content. There is of course a duty to consider how that operates, but when it comes algorithms promoting harmful content, I wonder whether we could be a bit firmer in the way we treat that. I do not think that would restrain free speech, because the right of free speech is the right to say something; it is not the right to have an algorithm automatically promoting it. Again, Frances Haugen had some interesting comments on that.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Chris Ian Brian Mynott Philp (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. and learned Friend is right, as always. We can only expect Ofcom to do so much, and I think inviting expert academic researchers to look at this material would be welcome. There is already a mechanism in clause 137 to produce a report, but on reflection it might be possible to speed that up. Others who scrutinise the Bill may also reach that conclusion. It is important to think particularly about the operation of algorithmic promotion of harmful content, perhaps in a more prescriptive way than we do already. As I have said, Frances Haugen’s evidence to our Committee in this area was particularly compelling.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with my hon. Friend on both points. I discussed the point about researcher access with him last week, when our roles were reversed, so I am sympathetic to that. There is a difference between that and the researcher access that the Digital Services Act in Europe envisages, which will not have the legal powers that Ofcom will have to compel and demand access to information. It will be complementary but it will not replace the primary powers that Ofcom will have, which will really set our regime above those elsewhere. It is certainly my belief that the algorithmic amplification of harmful content must be addressed in the transparency reports and that, where it relates to illegal activities, it must absolutely be within the scope of the regulator to state that actively promoting illegal content to other people is an offence under this legislation.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): On that point, if a platform has a policy not to accept a certain sort of content, I think the regulators should expect it to say in its transparency report what it is doing to ensure that it is not actively promoting that content through a newsfeed, on Facebook or "next up" on YouTube. I expect that to be absolutely within the scope of the powers we have in place.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Chris Ian Brian Mynott Philp (Conservative, Centre-right): In terms of content that is legal but potentially harmful, as the Bill is drafted, the platforms will have to set out their policies, but their policies can say whatever they like, as we discussed earlier. A policy could include actively promoting content that is harmful through algorithms, for commercial purposes. At the moment, the Bill as constructed gives them that freedom. I wonder whether that is an area that we can think about making slightly more prescriptive. Giving them the option to leave the content up there relates to the free speech point, and I accept that, but choosing to algorithmically promote it is slightly different. At the moment, they have the freedom to choose to algorithmically promote content that is toxic but falls just on the right side of legality. If they want to do that, that freedom is there, and I just wonder whether it should be. It is a difficult and complicated topic and we are not going to make progress on it today, but it might be worth giving it a little more thought I think I have probably spoken for long enough on this Bill, not just today but over the last few months. I broadly welcome these amendments but I am sure that, as the Bill completes its stages, in the other place as well, there will be opportunities to slightly fine-tune it that all of us can make a contribution to.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Adam Afriyie (Conservative, Centre-right): I commend my hon. Friend for the powerful speech he is making. It seems to many of us here that if anyone is going to be setting the law or a regulation, it should really be done in the Chamber of this House. I would be very happy if we had annual debates on what may be harmful but is currently lawful, in order to make it illegal. I very much concur with what he is saying.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Government Operations
Nicholas Anthony Fletcher (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution, which deals with what I was going to finish with. It is not enough for the Secretary of State to have to consult Ofcom; there should be public consultation too. I support amendment 55, which my hon. Friend has tabled.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Government Operations
Julian Carlton Knight (Conservative, Centre-right): Although this is not contained within these measures, it is pertaining to them. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that, down the line, Ofcom will want to look at a regime of compliance officers in order to give the guidance that he seeks?
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Jeremy Paul Wright (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, that is a possible way forward. Ofcom will need to produce a code of practice in this area. I am sure my hon. Friend on the Front Bench will say that that is a suitable way to deal with the problem that I have identified. It may well be, but at this stage, it is right for the House to recognise that the drafting of the Bill at the moment seeks to offer support to platforms, for which I am sure they will be grateful, but it will need to offer some more in order to allow these judgments to be made I restate the point that I have made in previous debates on this subject: there is little point in this House passing legislation aimed to make the internet a safer place if the legislation does not work as it is intended to. If our regime does not work, we will keep not a single person any safer. It is important, therefore, that we think about this Bill not in its overarching statements and principles but, particularly at this stage of consideration, in terms of how it will actually work You will not find a bigger supporter of the Bill in this House than me, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I want to see it work well and be effective. That means that some of the problems that I am highlighting must be addressed. Because humility is a good way to approach debates on something as ground-breaking and complex as this, I do not pretend that I have all the right answers. These amendments have been tabled because the Bill as it stands does not quite yet do the job that we want it to do. It is a good Bill—it needs to pass—but it can be better, and I very much hope that this process will improve it.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Jeremy Paul Wright (Conservative, Centre-right): What the hon. and learned Lady says is sensible, but does she accept—this is a point the Minister made earlier—that, at the moment, the platforms have almost unfettered control over what they take down and what they leave up? What this Bill does is present a framework for the balancing exercise that they ought to apply in making those decisions.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): On the amendments that the former Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), spoke to, the word "consistently" has not been removed from the text. There is new language that follows the use of "consistently", but the use of that word will still apply in the context of the companies’ duties to act against illegal content.[Official Report, 21 July 2022, Vol. 718, c. 13MC.]
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Technology
Damian Noel Thomas Collins (Conservative, Centre-right): It does focus on systems as well as content. We often talk about content because it is the exemplar for the failure of the systems, but the systems are entirely within the scope of the Bill.
Online Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-07-12
Topic: Government Operations
Jeremy Paul Wright (Conservative, Centre-right): I think it is extraordinarily important that this Bill does what the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) has just described. As the Bill moves from this place to the other place, we must debate what the right balance is between what the Secretary of State must do—in the previous group of amendments, we heard that many of us believe that is too extensive as the Bill stands—what the regulator, Ofcom, must do and what Parliament must do. There is an important judgment call for this House to make on whether we have that balance right in the Bill as it stands These amendments are very interesting. I am not convinced that the amendments addressed by the hon. Lady get the balance exactly right either, but there is cause for further discussion about where we in this House believe the correct boundary is between what an independent regulator should be given authority to do under this legislative and regulatory structure and what we wish to retain to ourselves as a legislature.