Lord Nash (Con)

My Lords, in moving Motion G1, concerning my social media amendment, as an amendment to Motion G, I will support the spirit of the Motion tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I believe we need a dual-track approach. I pay tribute to those noble tech Lords, many of whom are here tonight, who worked so tirelessly on the Online Safety Act, but now it clearly needs updating and strengthening. Nobody could have foreseen the pace of technological change that has taken place in recent years. I believe that, in relation to children, we should have a dual-track approach to social media, which puts the onus squarely on the companies to make their products safe for children, as we would with any other product, using safety-by-design principles. I have been a director of tech companies in California. The Californian techies are some of the most able, innovative, entrepreneurial, wealth-creating and job-creating people in the world. However, in the cavalier approach that they have taken to harmful content online for our children, they have gone way too far in prioritising their commercial instincts. We need to act now in a way that is truly effective—and of course we know that many of these techies do not let their own children anywhere near social media. I do not need to spend much time talking about the clear evidence and causal link between social media and harm to our children, but I was horrified to hear the right honourable Liz Kendall say on the radio a few weeks ago that there is no proven causal link. Where has she been? This shows just how far behind the A ball the Government are in their thinking and why we can have no faith in the outcome of the consultation. I provided noble Lords with an evidence document compiled by health professionals and others, showing the harmful effects of social media from 50 examples. Every day, I receive more research from around the world from experienced academics, health professionals and others to the same effect. This includes evidence from whistleblowers at social media companies about their company’s own internal research, showing clearly, based on the very extensive data available to them, the harms to children of social media. In recent days, the chief executive of Pinterest, a social media company with 600 million customers, has said that we are living through the largest social experiment in history and that social media, as it is configured today, is not safe for children under 16. As the Prime Minister of Greece said recently, when announcing measures similar to those dealt with in my Motion, as so many other countries have done, “The evidence is unambiguous”. Only minutes ago, a court in Los Angeles found that Meta and Google were negligent and intentionally built addictive social media platforms, after a 20 year-old woman said that her early use of social media was addictive and made her depression worse. This comes after a court yesterday in New Mexico found that Meta is harmful to children’s mental health and fined it $375 million. These cases will likely influence the hundreds of similar cases now winding their way through the US courts. There has been some comment in the press and by honourable Members in the other place that children’s charities are not united in their approach to protecting children online. I am delighted to be able to tell noble Lords that I have had extensive discussions with charitable and civil society organisations across the sector and there is broad agreement that an age-based restriction on harmful platforms should operate alongside full-throated enforcement of and increased potency of the Online Safety Act. I turn to the consultation, and it is a shocker. It does not even satisfy the Government’s own consultation principles that such exercises should be clear and accessible—it has 62 questions, which I understand many parents have given up on after answering just a few—or that it should be targeted at appropriate stakeholders, as opposed to severely prejudicing parents’ ability to contribute. It has no structured engagement for front-line professionals such as clinicians, social workers and police, with no transparency as to how evidence would be used. The Government may have 30,000 responses but, given the length of the consultation document, I very much doubt that that represents a cross-section of society or the national conversation that they want. Market research professionals tell me that this would not begin to pass muster in a market research study. Some questions require technical or specialist knowledge, there is little information on how responses will be weighted between different groups, and it goes out of its way to emphasise, in square boxes, the benefits of social media without balancing sufficiently the disbenefits. I turn to Commons Amendments 38A to 38D, and in particular Amendment 38A, which contains a very broad power enabling the Government to make changes to any Act of Parliament. There are many noble Lords here who are far more capable of pronouncing on this than I am. This consultation and the amendments that the Government have tabled represent a blank cheque, with no definite timescale for action and no obligation to do anything. I have no doubt that no action has happened with the gender identity in schools consultation results—when they eventually came—and that they will require further lengthy consultation. I strongly suspect that this cheque will come back marked “insufficient action”. Lastly, I pay tribute to the 21 bereaved parents who support my amendment, many of whom are here in the Public Gallery. I thank them for their hard work, their commitment and the fact that they are here—but I wish they were not, because I wish they did not have to be. I do not want to stand here in six or 12 months’ time, banging the same old drum, with even more bereaved parents in the Public Gallery. I urge noble Lords to support my amendment by agreeing to my Motion G1. I beg to move.