My Lords, I will be very brief. The danger with Clause 158 is that it discredits media literacy as something benign or anodyne;
it will become a political plaything. I am already sceptical, but if ever there was anything to add to this debate then it is that.
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I am very anxious about the notion that media literacy would be used in this way for public health or safety, as in the examples, because all my examples of where it has all gone horribly wrong—through government politicisation or politicised interventions in social media companies—have been in the recent lockdowns and over Covid. I am very worried about that and will talk about it later. We have had “nudge units”, about which there have been all sorts of scandals, but I will not go on about them. There will be a real problem if this is offloaded on to Ofcom—if Ofcom is instructed to do something—the Government will effectively be interfering in what social media is allowed to say or do and in what people are to understand to be the truth. It will discredit that.
The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, made a very good point in our last session. When I try to assess this, I understand that the Secretary of State is elected and that Ofcom is an unelected regulator, so in many ways it is more democratic that the Secretary of State should be openly politicised, but I am concerned that in this instance the Secretary of State will force the unelected Ofcom to do something that the Government will not do directly but will do behind the scenes. That is the danger. We will not even be able to see it correctly and it will emerge to the public as “media literacy” or something of that nature. That will obfuscate accountability even further. I have a lot of sympathy for the amendment to leave out this clause.