Lord Nash (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to Motion A1 and my amendment on social media. Discussions have taken place with the Government and I thank them for their engagement, but we have not yet reached an agreement and I will put this matter to a vote today. I note the change from “may” to “must”, but it is not a “must” to do anything very specific. However, based on statements that the Prime Minister has made, I believe we are at one on the features of social media that should not be available to children. He said the “algorithms, clearly to my mind, shouldn’t be permitted” and that “they must go”. He has said: “Things can’t go on like this, they must change because right now social media is putting our children at risk”; “I don’t think the next generation would forgive us if we didn’t act now”; “My government will not leave parents to face this battle alone”; “There’s an overwhelming case and that’s why we have to act”; “We’ve taken the powers to make sure we can act within months, not years”. However, the Government’s new amendment gives them 36 months to lay the first regulations. I understand that Ministers are arguing in the other place that they need three years to lay the first regulations because they fear the possibility of a judicial review, though they have not explained by whom or why. The reality is that a judicial review would not be brought until the Government have announced their plans and published draft regulations. There is always a risk of judicial review when making regulations, but if the Government specify in the Bill in clear terms what they intend to do, there would be a much-reduced risk of JR. If an Act of Parliament requires the Government to act in a particular way, the courts cannot and will not intervene. Parliament is sovereign. Were they to accept my proposals, which would put greater detail in the Bill about matters on which we appear to agree—how and when Ministers must raise the age of access to certain social media features—they would substantially reduce the chance of judicial review. Insisting on their vague discretionary powers would only increase the risk for Ministers. I will share some evidence that I have come across from recent social media cases. Meta staff discussed how Instagram, a Meta platform, is a drug and said: “We’re basically pushers”. Meta’s own testing found that its algorithms were recommending nearly four times as many children to suspected groomers as to ordinary adults—close to 2 million minors in three months, with 22% of those recommendations resulting in a follow-up request. A Meta safety manager put the number of child victims of inappropriate interactions at 500,000 per day in English-speaking markets alone. One can now buy online an AI agent which enables a male adult to pretend to be a girl, contact a young boy through social media, persuade him to send nude images of himself and then blackmail him. This is sextortion, which has resulted in a number of suicides by young boys. One social media site is particularly well known as the medium for this. Concerning the Government’s proposals on “must”, not “may”, curfews or time limits cannot be used to tackle harmful, precision-engineered algorithms and addictive features. If they are harmful, they are harmful. As the Prime Minister said, you cannot expect parents to deal with this on their own. If they focus on parental controls, it will only exacerbate the conflicts that we know already take place every night in households across the country.