My Lords, I declare an interest as a series producer at Raw TV making content for CNN. I echo the call of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, for a rapid introduction of the online harms Bill. We need it as soon as possible.
In a digital age when internet access is now a utility, without which it is almost impossible to be part of life, internet safety has never been more important. We have heard much recently about how platforms and websites have been designed to capture users. This was reinforced for me by comments from the co-founder of Facebook, Sean Parker, who now declares himself a conscientious objector to social media. He said:
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains … The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them ... was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”
The engineers of Facebook and other tech companies, he explained, ensured that the users of platforms receive a small dopamine hit when they give likes or make comments, creating a potentially dangerous “social-validation feedback loop”. Much of the concern about the internet, reflected in the White Paper, concentrates on taking down the abusive and harmful content received by users and introducing a new complaints system. That is welcome, but the sheer volume of abuse online and the ability of the perpetrators easily to move their comments across the internet makes such a regime hard to enforce.
The design issue raised by Sean Parker must be at the heart of any new legislation. I emphasise the overriding significance of a duty of care on all tech
companies to build safety designs into their digital systems, making them responsible for the safety of their users, and that would need to be enforced by a regulator. The White Paper calls for steps to ensure that products and systems are safe by design, but the Bill must ensure that this is a comprehensive approach. All sites must examine whether they encourage bad behaviour and harmful content. They must examine their navigation and discovery mechanisms to ensure that their algorithms do not prioritise fake news and outrage to generate clickbait. A regulator must ask companies to exercise a risk assessment of their systems and then to enforce implementation very thoroughly.
Part of safety by design must incorporate Sean Parker’s concern about engineering potential addiction into the internet. One of my particular concerns is what is happening in the unregulated areas of online gaming. The gracious Speech has a review of the Gambling Act to include loot boxes and the use of credit cards for gambling. Loot boxes are a relatively new introduction into the gaming world. They allow users to spend money buying random and unknown selections of extra content, which, depending on what is in the box, will either enhance or diminish the player’s abilities. There is evidence that huge amounts of money are being spent by young players on loot boxes and myriad other means of paying to enhance their position in the game. At the moment, the video game manufacturers refuse to put a ceiling on this spend or self-regulate their industry responsibly.
It is good that the Government are reviewing whether the loot-box aspect of video gaming should be covered by a gambling regulator, but the problem is much wider and deeper than just loot boxes. Internet and gaming addiction is baked into the design of their systems. It should be part of a new digital regulator’s role to gather reliable evidence of the extent of this problem and, if necessary, to have the powers to enforce a safe design on gambling and video game companies limiting time and money spent on online, often by young people to the detriment of the rest of their lives.
On another matter, before Christmas the Chief Secretary to the Treasury confirmed that the Prime Minister had ordered a review into the sanction for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. This issue was looked only four years ago by David Perry QC, who concluded that there should be no change in the sanction regime. The recent report into public service broadcasting in the digital age by the Communications and Digital Committee, of which I have the honour of being a member, learned that the BBC’s licence fee revenue is already falling dramatically on an annual basis. Surely to alter the sanction regime now would only create a further reduction in revenue.
The committee pointed out that by 2022 the revenue available to public service broadcasting in the UK would be massively dwarfed by the mainly American streaming giants coming into the market. They have a global income to outspend British channels in all genres except news. The Government stated in their evidence to the committee that
“in this changing media landscape, the purposes of PSB—to inform our understanding of the world; to stimulate knowledge and learning; to reflect UK cultural identity … remain vitally important.”
I suggest that a review of the sanction regime would damage this anchor of our country’s cultural identity. Instead, the Government should follow one of the report’s recommendations: to set up an independent and transparent licensing body which would decide how one of our greatest national institutions is funded. In the post-Brexit world we must do everything we can to make sure that our great public institutions prosper and act as a calling card for this country across the globe.
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