My Lords, the Government have moved on this issue, and I very much welcome that. I am grateful to the Minister for listening and for the fact that we now have Section 11 of the Communications Act being brought into the digital age through the Government’s Amendments 274B and 274C. The public can now expect to be informed and educated about content-related harms, reliability and accuracy; technology companies will have to play their part; and Ofcom will have to regularly report on progress, and will commission and partner with others to fulfil those duties. That is great progress.
The importance of this was underscored at a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council just two weeks. Nada Al-Nashif, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights in an opening statement said that media and digital literacy empowered individuals and
“should be considered an integral part of education efforts”.
Tawfik Jelassi, the assistant director-general of UNESCO, in a statement attached to that meeting, said that
“media and information literacy was essential for individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression”—
I put that in to please the noble Baroness, Lady Fox—and
“enabled access to diverse information, cultivated critical thinking, facilitated active engagement in public discourse, combatted misinformation, and safeguarded privacy and security, while respecting the rights of others”.
If only the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, was in his place to hear me use the word privacy. He continued:
“Together, the international community could ensure that media and information literacy became an integral part of everyone’s lives, empowering all to think critically, promote digital well-being, and foster a more inclusive and responsible global digital community”.
I thought those were great words, summarising why we needed to do this.
I am grateful to Members on all sides of the House for the work that they have done on media literacy. Part of repeating those remarks was that this is so much more about empowerment than it is about loading safety on to individuals, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, rightly said in her comments.
Nevertheless, we want the Minister to reflect on a couple of tweaks. Amendment 269C in my name is around an advisory committee being set up within six months and in its first report assessing the need for a code on misinformation. I have a concern that, as the regime that we are putting in place with this Bill comes into place and causes some of the harmful content that people find engaging to be suppressed, the algorithms
will go to something else that is engaging, and that something else is likely to be misinformation and disinformation. I have a fear that that will become a growing problem that the regulator will need to be able to address, which is why it should be looking at this early.
Incidentally, that is why the regulator should also look at provenance, as in Amendment 269AA from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. It was tempting in listening to him to see whether there was an AI tool that could trawl across all the comments that he has made during the deliberations on this Bill to see whether he has quoted the whole of the joint report—but that is a distraction.
My Amendment 269D goes to the need for media literacy on systems, processes and business models, not just on content. Time and again, we have emphasised the need for this Bill to be as much about systems as content. There are contexts where individual, relatively benign pieces of content can magnify if part of a torrent that then creates harm. The Mental Health Foundation has written to many of us to make this point. In the same way that the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, asked about ensuring that those with disability have their own authentic voice heard as these media literacy responsibilities are played out, so the Mental Health Foundation wanted the same kind of involvement from young people; I agree with both. Please can we have some reassurance that this will be very much part of the literacy duties on Ofcom and the obligations it places on service providers?