My Lords, as so often in the course of the Bill, I associate myself wholeheartedly with the comments that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just made. I, too, thank my noble friend the Minister and the Secretary of State for listening to our debates in Committee on the need to be explicit about the impact of cumulative harmful content. So I support Amendments 281C, 281D and 281E, and I thank them for tabling them.
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In the previous group, we talked about and debated the hugely important topic of content harm, most particularly pornography, and the need to ensure an absolutely firm bar that prevents our children seeing such content. As my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, content is not the only harm on the internet—quite the opposite. Internet algorithms on social media platforms do not care what the content is. The computer does not read the content; the algorithm simply drives addiction. So the functionality is the root of an awful lot of the harms that our children are experiencing today, completely unregulated—whether it is driving addiction, creating dangerous friendship groups, connecting people who should not be able to be connected to our underage minors, or tracking individuals in real time.
My teenage daughter is currently in America on a school tour, and I have been stalking and tracking her to see where she is. But, each time I do, a shiver runs down my spine as I think how easy it would be for a predator to do the same thing, without recognising that non-content harm is a real and present danger to our children. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, this is not to say that these functionalities are not brilliant. It makes me, as her mum, feel good that I can track her. As the noble Lord, Lord Allan, said last week, we need to remember that this is about priority harm and not primary priority harm. It is not black and white that it is always bad; it is a functionality, and we should require companies to assess the risk that it imposes on young people. That is why it is so important that we recognise this as a part of the Bill.
I know that my noble friend the Minister will want to say, “This is all included in the Bill anyway. Why have you all got your knickers in a twist about this? We’re all on track, and we’re going to do it. Ofcom has done all of the pre-work. It’s there”. My worry is that this is a complex and technical Bill. We have all got ourselves tangled up in the structure of it, and, if it is not in the Bill that non-content harms are real harms, the risk of it not being clear in the future is very great. I do not understand the argument—presented to us many times over the last few weeks—that, by putting it in the Bill, we make it worse, not better. I am no lawyer, but it seems strange to me that we are now specifying every other element of harm clearly in the Bill, but, together, we have not been able to find a wording that puts this in.
I am willing to accept that the amendments that I put my name to and that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, introduced so powerfully might not be the best way to do this. We might well have unintentionally fallen on to a landmine in this complex Bill. But I cannot accept that it is not necessary to put it in the Bill, so I urge my noble friend the Minister to accept the principle behind these amendments. If he cannot accept them today, I ask him to firmly commit to bring back government amendments that put non-content harms in the Bill. Otherwise, I will need to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, through the Lobbies.