Lia Nici and Martin Vickers celebrate prompting government Online Safety Bill re-think
It would see tougher punishments for those who fail to block children from seeing damaging content on their platforms
Two northern Lincolnshire MPs are celebrating prompting a government re-think on its online safety bill.
The government will make social media bosses criminally liable for failing to protect children online after 37 Conservative backbenchers, including the Great Grimsby MP Lia Nici and Cleethorpes MP Martin Vickers, pushed for this.
The backbenchers introduced their own amendment introducing this extra sanction of tech bosses potentially going to jail if they failed to take action to protect children online when issues occur.
With Labour set to support the amendment and the government’s majority only requiring around 30 Conservative MPs to vote against its wishes, the Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan has conceded the change. The original backbench amendment is being withdrawn in favour of a future similar government-proposed amendment.
Ms Nici and Mr Vickers have both argued the change shows parliament working in its duty to scrutinise laws. The Cleethorpes MP also rejected the suggestion that the group of Conservative MPs had rebelled. If the government’s position had stayed the same, by voting for the change this would have been against the party leadership’s wishes.
“We’re very happy that the Secretary of State and the government have listened to our proposals on this amendment,” said Lia Nici to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS). She added that Michelle Donellan has “worked really positively” with the backbench group and there was a precedent after a new Irish law passed last year. This gave “firm foundations” for the Conservative MPs that had pushed for a change.
The bill had not been in Ms Nici’s view “strong enough” on protection for harmful content with regard to children. “Constituents were concerned and wanted to make sure we did everything we could to protect children,” she later said.
Introducing possible jail time for tech bosses if they did not act she felt would prompt them to “take their duty of care more seriously”. It had already included financial penalties of potentially 20 per cent of a company’s turnover for breaches. But Ms Nici said the backbenchers were concerned this could be absorbed as part of such companies’ “financial planning”.
“As we know, most social media platforms are incredibly rich, probably richer than many countries across the world. And we didn’t feel that company fines, no matter how large they would be, would really affect the business.”
The online safety bill is a flagship piece of legislation of the government. Its aim is to protect children and adults online, and make social media companies more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms.
Ms Nici said the re-think on criminal liability for social media bosses showed “democracy in action”, while Mr Vickers said it was “nonsense” for it to be reported as a rebellion. “It’s MPs doing their job, which is to scrutinise legislation and proposed changes, and so on.”
The penalty of financial fines risked being “meaningless” because of the wealth of the social media platforms. He likened the amendment to putting social media bosses on a criminal liability par with directors of travel operators in terms of preventing risk to customers. “There is still a fairly high bar because you’ve got prove they’ve been criminally irresponsible,” he added.
“We’ve gone a long way to making the online environment safer, particularly for younger people who come under the influence of these companies.”
Platforms will be required under the online safety bill to enforce age limits and age-checking measures to prevent underage children having social media accounts. They will also need to remove all legal content and content banned by their own terms and conditions. A requirement for adult internet users to be able to tailor the type of content they see and avoid potentially harmful content is included.
As is the demand for platforms to prevent children from being allowed to access harmful or age-inappropriate content. This covers pornography and elements which promote or glorify self-harm.
In a written statement published on the morning of Tuesday, January 17, Michelle Donelan announced plans to work with those who had moved the criminal liability amendment to table a similar change. This change will give the online safety bill “additional teeth to deliver change and ensure that people are held to account if they fail to properly protect children”, Ms Donelan wrote. Full details of the bill change are expected in coming days.