Second Report - Tackling online abuse

Online abuse can have a devastating impact on those who are exposed to it, and we are alarmed at evidence suggesting the problem has worsened since the covid-19 pandemic began. While tackling this issue is important in making the online environment safer for everyone, it must be recognised that online abuse is disproportionately targeted at certain groups. The Government is right to acknowledge the extent of this problem but should assess and track the scale of this behaviour more precisely and comprehensively.

As part of its role as the new online safety regulator, we recommend that Ofcom should regularly report on the incidence of online abuse, illegal hate speech, and Violence Against Women and Girls content on the largest social media platforms. This should include disaggregating estimates of the likelihood of a user encountering or being the target of abusive content according to characteristics including race, disability, sexuality, and gender, as well as differentiating between child and adult users. (Paragraph 22) Social media and user safety

Our predecessor Petitions Committee’s report concluded that self-regulation of social media had failed. Despite the user safety tools and innovations platforms have introduced since then, these companies have continued to place insufficient priority on user safety to protect users from abusive and hateful behaviour on their platforms, or ensure users are able to effectively raise their concerns when subjected to this behaviour. We support the Government’s intention to end social media self- regulation and introduce a statutory regulatory framework. (Paragraph 32) The Online Safety Bill

It is appropriate for legal but harmful content to be included in the scope of the Online Safety Bill. The balance of evidence we heard suggests that it is necessary to address this content in the Bill to help protect people from online abuse and promote free speech among groups currently unable to fully express themselves online. However, the lack of clarity in the draft version of the Bill on what content will be covered under this definition is unhelpful. Providing greater clarity on the scope and scale of content the Government expects this definition to capture, and reducing reliance on Ministerial powers to designate such content via secondary legislation at a later date, would be more consistent with respect for freedom of expression. We recommend that the Online Safety Bill should include as comprehensive an indication as possible of what content will be covered under its provisions on content that is harmful to adults or to children in the primary legislation.

The Government’s online safety proposals do not go far enough in acknowledging and seeking to tackle the heightened levels of abuse faced by some communities online. While the requirement for Ofcom to consult with civil society groups in Tackling Online Abuse 47 developing elements of the regulatory framework such as codes of practice for platforms is welcome, the Online Safety Bill should ensure specific protections for these communities. The Bill should align with the protections already established in the Equality Act and hate crime laws, and require social media companies to consider the different risks potentially faced by users from these communities on their platforms. It should also include additional user advocacy arrangements over and above those already set out in the draft Bill.

We recommend that the Online Safety Bill should include a statutory duty for the Government to consult with civil society organisations representing children and users who are most affected by online abuse on the legislation’s ongoing effectiveness at tackling online abuse, and how it could be refined to better achieve this goal. This should include, but need not be limited to, explicitly requiring the Secretary of State to consult with such organisations when reviewing the regulatory framework as set out in Section 115 of the draft Bill. The organisations consulted in this way should include those consulted by Ofcom in developing codes of practice and transparency reporting guidance for platforms.

We recommend that the Online Safety Bill should include abuse based on the characteristics protected under the Equality Act and hate crime legislation as priority harmful content in the primary legislation. It should also list hate crime and Violence Against Women and Girls offences as specific relevant offences within the scope of the Bill’s illegal content safety duties and specify the particular offences covered under these headings, as the draft Bill already does for terrorism and Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse offences.

The risk assessments platforms will be required to carry out under the new online safety regulatory framework must not treat all users as being equally at risk from abusive content or behaviour. Instead, we recommend that platforms should be required to give separate consideration to the different risks faced by groups including women, users from minority ethnic backgrounds, disabled users, and LGBT+ users, and that this requirement should be made explicit in the risk assessment duties set out in the Online Safety Bill.

It is not acceptable that young people should see encountering abuse as just part of the online experience. We welcome the strength of the duties the draft Online Safety Bill would impose on platforms to help reduce the chance that children and young people will come across or be targeted by abusive content online. However, we are concerned that the draft Bill’s chosen threshold for the child user condition may mean children will remain at risk of encountering abusive and other harmful content on smaller platforms, where it can still lead to real-world harm.

The Government must ensure the Online Safety Bill’s safety duties relating to content harmful to children apply across a sufficiently comprehensive range of platforms to prevent young people continuing to be able to access or encounter abusive or other harmful content online once the legislation is enacted. We recommend that the Government reviews the child user condition proposed in the draft Bill to ensure it does not impede this aim by excluding too many platforms from the scope of these duties. (Paragraph 51) 48 Tackling Online Abuse

Abusive content hosted on smaller platforms can play a significant role in helping to encourage prejudicial attitudes or even real-world harm. Failure to address this content would risk significantly undermining the potential impact of the proposed online safety legislation in tackling online and offline hate. The duties set out in the Online Safety Bill relating to content that is legal but harmful to adults must apply to a wide enough range of platforms to ensure that abusive content is removed from the online sphere, not merely shifted from larger platforms onto smaller ones subject to less regulatory oversight.

We recommend that the Online Safety Bill requires smaller (non-category 1) platforms to take steps to protect users from content that is legal but harmful to adults, with a particular focus on ensuring these platforms cannot be used to host content that has the potential to encourage hate or prejudice towards individuals or communities.

The Online Safety Bill should retain the provision in the draft Bill to hold platforms liable for failing to consistently enforce their terms of service. We heard that this step would significantly improve users’ online experiences—especially those users most likely to face abuse. However, compliance with rules that platforms themselves retain the freedom to set does not provide a sufficiently clear, objective or robust standard of expected protection for adult users in relation to content that is legal but harmful. The Bill should provide a stronger framework in primary legislation for tackling the harm arising from this content.

The Government’s regulatory proposals should encourage social media companies to prevent or reduce the risk of users being harmed by abusive and hateful content in the first place, not just remove or otherwise deal with such content as it arises. However, the draft Online Safety Bill gives Ofcom very limited scope to ensure platforms are taking positive steps to protect adult users from this risk where abuse falls below the criminal threshold. Where content has been identified as harmful, users should be able to expect platforms to take proportionate steps to proactively protect their safety and wellbeing, and the regulator should be able to ensure this expectation is being met.

We support calls for the Online Safety Bill to include a foundational duty on platforms to protect users from reasonably foreseeable risks of harm identified in their risk assessments, including harm arising from abusive content that is legal but harmful to adults. We recommend that this should include an explicit expectation that platforms consider how not only content moderation, but also changes to system design and user functionalities, could help mitigate or prevent these risks. (Paragraph 67) Online abuse and the criminal law

The Law Commission is right to recommend refocusing online communications offences onto the harm abusive messages can cause to victims. We welcome the Government’s commitment to adopt the proposed threatening and ‘harm-based’ communications offences. However, we also acknowledge the uncertainty and hesitation of some witnesses about how the new harm-based offence will be Tackling Online Abuse 49 interpreted in practice, including the role of social media companies and other online platforms in identifying this content—as well as other witnesses’ desire for the law to deal with more cases of online abuse more strongly.

The Government should monitor how effectively any new communications offences that are enacted—in particular, the Law Commission’s proposed harm-based offence—protect people from, and provide redress for victims of, online abuse, while also respecting freedom of expression online. We recommend that the Government publishes an initial review of the workings and impact of any new communications offences within the first two years after they come into force.

We support the proposals in the Law Commission’s hate crime review to extend aggravated hate crime offences across all characteristics protected under existing hate crime legislation, and to reform the ‘hostility’ motivation test to better reflect the nature of some hate crimes affecting disabled people—both of which were called for in the previous Petitions Committee’s 2019 report, Online abuse and the experience of disabled people.

We recommend that the Government accepts the Law Commission’s proposals to extend the characteristics to which aggravated hate crime offences can apply, and to reform the motivation test for hate crimes to include prejudice as well as hostility; and that it sets a timeline for bringing these changes forward.

Improvements in the drafting of the criminal law are irrelevant if these offences are not enforced. Many witnesses suggested the police did not have the resources they needed to be able to effectively investigate online abuse and hate crime. This undermines the important role played by the criminal law as a response to abusive behaviour online.

Alongside the introduction of the new communications offences, we recommend that the Government ensures the police and other law enforcement bodies have adequate resources to effectively investigate and prosecute communications, hate crime, and Violence Against Women and Girls offences committed online. This should include scaling up the work of existing specialist teams such as the Online Hate Crime Hub. The Government should also ensure police officers are being offered the right training to identify when these offences have been committed and to support victims of these offences when they come forward. (Paragraph 86) Anonymity and accountability

Anonymous abuse online is significant in both its volume and impact. However, the evidence we heard suggested that tackling the abuse being perpetrated under the cloak of anonymity, rather than imposing restrictions on online anonymity, should be the focus of efforts to resolve this problem. Allowing users to post anonymously does nonetheless entail a risk that this capability is misused, and so it would be sensible and proportionate for online platforms to be required to specifically evaluate—and consider what steps could be taken in response to—links between anonymity and abusive content on their platform. (Paragraph 92) 50 Tackling Online Abuse

As part of the risk assessments social media platforms will be required to carry out under the new online safety regulation, we recommend that platforms should be required to evaluate the role played by anonymous accounts in creating and disseminating abusive content, and to consider how to minimise the misuse of anonymity for this purpose. Platforms should be required to take action to mitigate risks of harm to users uncovered through this work arising from anonymously posted content.

Social media platforms told us they already have rules against previously banned users returning, as well as the tools and data needed to identify users and prevent them starting new accounts. However, the evidence we heard suggests this is not a priority for them, and that some users are taking advantage of poor enforcement of such bans to continue to behave abusively. This is a significant failing by these platforms.

Social media platforms must have robust methods in place to trace users posting content that violates the platform’s terms of service, and must effectively enforce their own sanctions against such users. We recommend that, as part of the new online safety regulatory framework, social media platforms should be required to demonstrate to Ofcom that they can identify previously banned users seeking to create new accounts and, where a platform’s rules prohibit these users from returning to the platform, that the platform is adequately enforcing these rules. Ofcom should have the power to issue fines or take other enforcement action if a platform is unable to demonstrate this.

Where there is a need to trace and investigate accounts posting potentially illegal content, this is usually technically possible even if the account is publicly anonymous. However, the police’s ability to trace accounts posting such content at scale is constrained by a lack of resources. This underlines the need for additional law enforcement resourcing as we call for in our recommendations on online abuse and the criminal law. The mixed evidence we heard about social media platforms’ cooperation with police requests for such information makes it welcome that the Government has previously indicated it is looking into the powers available to the police to identify users and tackle illegal anonymous abuse online. We recommend that the Government publishes the conclusions of its work to review whether current police powers are sufficient to tackle illegal anonymous abuse online, and that it sets out a timetable for any changes it believes are necessary as a result.

While we heard that there is insufficient evidence to determine that anonymity is the main driver of abusive behaviour online, we recognise that a proportion of abusive content comes from anonymous users. Giving users the option to filter out content from accounts that have not provided a form of identity verification, on a voluntary basis, would offer an extra tool that users can use to give themselves an additional layer of protection from abusive content.

We recommend that the Government set an expectation that the largest social media platforms should offer users the option to filter content by user verification status and block content from users who have chosen not to verify their account. User verification should not necessarily have to be in the form of an ID document, and Tackling Online Abuse 51 we recommend that Ofcom should conduct research to establish possible methods of account verification that offer a robust way to reduce users’ exposure to harmful content while also being maximally inclusive and accessible. (Paragraph 109) Social responses to online abuse

Alongside the legal, technological and regulatory responses to online abuse we have considered in this report, there is also a need to achieve long-term cultural and behavioural change that tackles online abuse by discouraging people from posting such content to begin with. The Government’s Online Media Literacy programme rightly seeks to give users of online platforms the skills and knowledge they need to be safe online, but there is also an equal need for the Government to invest in programmes which educate both adults and young people about acceptable and supportive online behaviour, and which challenge the prejudiced attitudes which are manifested in online abuse. (Paragraph 113) 52 Tackling Online Abuse