Lords urge government to take immediate action against online misinformation
Ministers have been urged to beef up regulation of digital and social media to stub out a “pandemic of misinformation and disinformation” that is destroying public trust and leveraging power to big tech companies.
A new report by the Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee, chaired by Labour peer and film director David Puttnam, proposes changes to online regulation to stem the spread of inaccurate news.
“This is a virus that affects all of us in the UK — a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation,” the report said. “If allowed to flourish, these counterfeit truths will result in the collapse of public trust, and without trust, democracy as we know it will simply decline into irrelevance. The situation is that serious.”
The select committee, which spent more than a year compiling recommendations, called on the government to limit the power that has been ceded to a “few unelected and unaccountable digital corporations” — namely, Facebook and Google.
It urged the government to hold tech giants to account by handing Ofcom powers to regulate online platforms. Among the 45 recommendations in the 153-page report is that Ofcom be given the power to levy new sanctions against tech giants if they fail in their duty of care, including fines of up to four per cent of global turnover.
“Technology is not a force of nature. Online platforms are not inherently ungovernable. They can and should be bound by the same restraints that we apply to the rest of society,” the report said.
Lord Puttnam added: “These international behemoths exercise great power without any matching accountability, often denying responsibility for the harm that some of the content they host can cause, while continuing to profit from it.”
The report also recommended that Ofcom be handed authority to clamp down on secretive “algorithmic recommending systems” that tech giants use to generate news feeds. Many have argued that algorithms are at the heart of the spread of disinformation, and are designed to recommend extreme content to users to garner more clicks.
The Lords committee also called on the government to bring forward the online harms bill, a highly-anticipated piece of legislation designed to hold internet companies to account for the safety of their users.
The online harms white paper published last year pledged to tighten regulation over terrorist propaganda, abusive imagery, cyberbullying and disinformation. However, the Lords committee expressed frustration at the apparent delay of the bill, adding that online regulation “needs to happen and it needs to happen fast”.
Lord Puttnam said: “It is time for the government to get a grip of this issue. They should start by taking steps to immediately bring forward a draft online harms bill. We heard that on the current schedule, the legislation may not be in place until 2024. That is clearly unacceptable.”
Among the Lords report’s key proposals is the creation of a new “super committee” on political advertising, drawing members from the Advertising Standards Authority, Electoral Commission and Ofcom, to develop a code of practice to tackle “fundamentally inaccurate advertising during a parliamentary or mayoral election, or referendum”.
Peers added that Electoral Commissions fines should be expanded from £20,000 to £500,000 or four percent of a campaign’s spend — whichever is greater — in a bid to limit disinformation that can help swing an election.
A DCMS spokesperson said: “We are developing world-leading plans to ensure online platforms have a duty of care towards their users and will introduce legislation as soon as possible.
“Since the start of the pandemic, specialist government units have been working around the clock to identify and rebut false information about coronavirus.
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