Wednesday 11 August 2021 Just before the start of the parliamentary summer recess I was elected to chair a special Joint Select Committee composed of members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, to scrutinise the Government’s proposed Online Safety Bill. The committee will hold hearings in the autumn and present its findings […]
Written for the Daily Telegraph - published 29 July 2021 The senior Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth wrote in a now infamous internal company memo “the ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good”. The trouble the tech […]
Article by Rhiannon Williams for The I Paper - published 29 July 2021 Social media companies must be stopped from making money through illegal and harmful content and held accountable for failing to remove it from their platforms, a top digital MP has warned. Damian Collins, former chair of House of Commons DCMS Select Committee that […]
Article by James Warrington for City AM - published 29 July 2021 A joint committee of MPs and lords has been launched today to scrutinise controversial government plans to tackle online harms. The new super committee will be tasked with seeking views on the online safety bill, which was published in draft form in May. […]
Article by Ryan Browne for CNBC. Published 12 July 2021 Facebook and Twitter are being criticized over a failure to act fast enough to tackle a flood of racial abuse directed at Black England soccer players following the team’s loss to Italy in the Euros final. Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka were the target of a […]
Article written for The Times - published 11 May 2021 Facebook knows it has a problem with content that can cause harm, and its own research has shown that not only does it allow such content to spread on its systems, but that its recommendation tools actively promote it to users. The company has to […]
Article by Hannah Boland for The Telegraph - published 11 April 2021 Google has been accused of insider trading in the digital advertising market in court documents which claim it ran a programme that allegedly gave it an advantage over rivals. The tech firm-which is battling a US antitrust case over its alleged dominant position-is […]
Article written for the Daily Mail - published 23 February 2021 This is a battle we should have fought and won long ago. But now that the stakes have risen so high - with Facebook and the Australian government at war over the tech giant's refusal to pay for news content - we must all […]
Article written for PoliticsHome - published 21 February 2021 With a united voice, we must support the Australian government in the face of this bullying from Facebook. This week the attention of the tech policy world has been focused on the Australian House of Representatives, where Scott Morrison’s liberal-national government are in the final stages […]
Article by Imogen Braddick for The Sun - published 18 February 2021 Nick Clegg has been called to resign over Facebook's Aussie news ban after MPs blasted the site's "staggering lack of respect" for democracy. The former Deputy Prime Minister, who became the tech giant's communications chief in 2018, has come under fire after the […]