Chris Bryant

It is always a delight to see you, Mr Vickers—and particularly to see you in the Chair, where you cannot take part in the debate. First, may I pay enormous tribute to Kim Campbell? Many other Members have already done so, but it is a significant achievement to force Parliament to debate something. Getting 130,000 people to sign up to the petition is a phenomenal achievement, so thank you very much. I think I can say that on behalf of all the political parties in Parliament and all Members of the House. I also thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan): first because he is a Labour Member for Folkestone and Hythe, which is a great advance in the world, and secondly because he advanced the cause on behalf of the Petitions Committee so effectively. Many Members may not know this, but when I was first elected back in 1873 under Queen Victoria, we did not have online petitions. It is an irony, in a way, that today we are talking about an online e-petition about online activity. If colleagues do not mind, I will not answer each contribution individually. Members have put their own arguments powerfully; there has been a mix of views, but with a general direction of travel, which I fully understand and to which I am very sympathetic. I want to lay out where we are at now and where we, as a Government, think that we could get to and should get to. The first thing to recognise is the utter toxicity of large parts of social media. You do not have to be an MP to be aware of that, but being an MP certainly does make you aware of it. The toxicity for children is utterly degrading and pernicious, as I think everybody in society recognises. We all recognise, too, that the social media companies need to go much further to protect children. We have talked about some of the misogyny that is evident on many platforms and to which kids have access—it is pumped at them, in fact, because that is sometimes what the algorithm seems to support. Similarly, there are large amounts of utter misinformation. I do not know who is driving that or why it is being driven; sometimes it may be state actors from elsewhere in the world, and sometimes it is just pernicious actors in their own right. Completely unrealistic body shapes are being promoted to girls and, for that matter, to boys. There was a time when the concern was solely that girls were being encouraged to be a particular shape, but exactly the same concern applies to many young men and boys today. I used to be a priest in the Church of England, many years ago; I was a clergyman in High Wycombe. While I was the curate there, a young girl took her own life, and then three of her friends took their own life in successive months. Undoubtedly, they had somehow or other managed to engage one another in that spiral. That was long before social media. Now, social media can play a pernicious role in undermining young people’s self-confidence and their belief in themselves through a whole series of images, videos and so on. That is very dangerous. Tackling this is one of the most important things that the Government have to do. It is good to have a former Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), with us today.