Oliver Dowden: Losing parental trust would be worst possible outcome for social media firms
3 min readParents losing trust in social media platforms to provide safe online environments for their children would be the worst outcome for the tech giants, Oliver Dowden has warned.
The Culture Secretary said the solution comes in the form of the UK’s world-leading legislation designed to hold them to account proportionately, adding that he takes the forthcoming Online Harms Bill seriously as both a minister and a parent. He said it would not trigger an exodus of tech firms concerned about adherence from the UK because the Government was not being “disproportionately unfair”.
Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok and YouTube are among the companies that will be subject to stricter regulation under a new statutory duty of care to UK users, particularly children, that will force platforms to assume greater responsibility for tackling potentially harmful content.
Broadcast regulator Ofcom will be given the power to issue fines of up to £18m or 10 per cent of global annual turnover, whichever is the higher, to companies found to be falling short of the new safety rules or to block services from being accessed in the UK altogether.
“I think the worst outcome for tech firms would be if I, as a parent, don’t have confidence that my children are safe engaging with a platform and want to block my children – well, good luck with that – from having access to those platforms,” he told i.
“These are real public harms that need to be addressed but I think they can be addressed in a way that is proportionate, and I don’t think tech firms want these harms themselves,” he added.
“It’s certainly not been the reaction from tech companies that they think that we’ve gone soft on them when we proposed a fine of 10 per cent of their global revenue, and I think that you can be unashamedly pro-tech, which I am, and not be always pro-platform”.
Mr Dowden also denied the Government was attempting to dictate to tech giants how to behave but would instead outline the standards it expected from social media platforms and would hold them to account through Ofcom.
“I know there’s this criticism sometimes that they’re marking their own homework – they’re not, Ofcom is marking their homework, but they are determining the correct approach and I think that is the right way of ensuring sufficient flexibility and ensuring there’s creativity for the tech firms whilst at the same time protecting the wider public interest.”
The NPSCC warned last year that failure to include criminal liability for legal but harmful content hosted on platforms could result in a “paper tiger bill” rather than a world-leading regulator.
Mr Dowden said that if it was possible for the bill to protect users without imposing criminal sanctions, it would, but that the measures could be called upon “in the most egregious of cases”.
The Government said 19,465 tech businesses were registered between January and December 2020, the equivalent of one every half an hour, adding that hiring in the sector had returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The sector will play a key role in helping the UK economy to bounce back in the next few months, Gerard Grech, chief executive of industry body Tech Nation said.
“Even in the midst of a global pandemic, the UK’s entrepreneurial spirit cannot be dampened,” he added.
“Start-ups and scale-ups formed during these last few months will be ones to watch in the future.”
