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 held an inquiry into disinformation and fake news between 2017 and 2019, has been appointed chair of a joint ‘super committee’ of Parliament set up to scrutinise the Online Safety Bill.
The first draft of the bill was published in May, outlining plans to give regulator Ofcom the power to fine social media firms and other tech companies it deemed to have failed in their duty of care to protect users online.
Mr Collins’ committee is asking the public for their views on the legislation and hopes to establish whether it poses a threat to freedom of expression.
The Folkestone and Hythe MP hopes to make Britain the safest place in the world to be online but warns damaging content has become integral to tech giants’ business models.
“These harms are a consequence of social media companies’ business models, it’s a consequence of the way they’ve designed their sites to work and to make money out of it,” he told i.
“They’re making money out of a system that is also exposing people to harm, and they’re responsible for it.
“Their systems are designed to promote content to drive engagement, so they are actually promoting illegal content – it’s not just a question of are they removing it, but if they’re actually promoting it. That is even more serious, and I think we have to consider what the right sanction for that should be.”
Once the bill passes into law, Ofcom can issue fines of up to £18m or 10 per cent of global annual turnover, whichever is the higher, to companies found to be falling short of the new safety rules or to block services from being accessed in the UK altogether.
Previous fines handed out by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) of £17.5m or 4 per cent of total annual turnover have been “far too low”, Mr Collins, said, adding that Ofcom’s fines would be severe enough to force tech giants to make the investments required to comply with the guidelines.
“These are very, very wealthy companies that can easily invest more to comply with these regulations, and they’re massively ineffective at effectively enforcing their own terms of service – Facebook’s terms and services don’t allow hate speech, for example,” he said.
“Sometimes the harm can be caused not just by an individual piece of content, but by the network-effect of that being shared multiple times and more people becoming exposed to it.
“We know that these things go on, but we’ve not had effective tools to really investigate and consider what steps could the companies take to reduce the sum of those harms or to remove it altogether. I think if we want to see a change in behaviour, we need to change an approach.”