Children not adequately protected from porn in Online Safety Bill, Lords warn

In a letter to Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, the Lords Communications and Digital Committee said it was concerned about the Bill because it does not cover porn sites which do not allow users to share content.

The Bill, which was finally published earlier this month after years of delays, focuses on sites that do not properly regulate user-submitted content. But porn sites which publish their own material are not covered under this remit.

The Committee also outlined other areas of concern that came to light in its inquiry into freedom of expression online.

The inquiry “points to some different legislative solutions than the ones currently selected by the government”, the Committee said, including the definition of harm, ‘content of democratic importance’ and journalistic content.

Lord Gilbert of Panteg, chair of the Committee, said: “Keeping children safe online is essential. Ensuring that these websites take appropriate steps to prevent children from accessing them, and ensuring that they do not host illegal content, is crucial.

“We share the government’s aim of making the internet safer for our citizens. Britain has an opportunity to lead the world in human-rights-based internet regulation. We must get this right.”

Peers have also called on the government to clarify if the Bill’s definition of psychological impact has any clinical basis and suggested that its definition of indirect impact from content was “vague and overly broad”.

“These are complex issues, which we know you and your department will have considered at length,” the letter to Downden said.

“It would be of great help to us to understand better the thinking behind the definitions in the Bill.”

The committee also called for greater examination of the scope of the rules around protecting content of democratic importance, which specifies that content intended to contribute to political debate, promoting or opposing government policy, should be protected.

Fake news has been an increasingly big issue in recent elections around the world as well as during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In November, it was reported that GCHQ launched a cyber investigation into disinformation around vaccines being spread by “hostile” states.