Dame Caroline Dinenage, MP for Gosport and former Minister for Digital and Culture at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, spoke in a Parliamentary debate on Online Harms.
The debate, secured by the Member of Parliament for East Hampshire, Damian Hinds, was about the Online Safety Bill which returns to the House of Commons next week. Caroline spoke in favour of the Bill, which aims to eliminate harmful content on the internet.
It comes after the inquest into Molly Russell’s death, a 14-year-old girl who ended her life in 2017 after being exposed to suicide and self-harm content.
The coroner’s report concluded that the social media content Molly was exposed to contributed to her death, and recommended that the algorithms used by social media networks are looked at.
The Online Safety Bill aims to combat so-called ‘legal but harmful’ content, so that children and vulnerable adults are not exposed to content, like that which promotes eating disorders, self-harm, or suicide, where potentially dangerous and disturbing content is not always illegal.
Dame Caroline was Minister for Digital and Culture for 19 months from February 2020 and led work on the Online Safety Bill.
Speaking in the debate, she said:
“If Molly Russell’s tragic case teaches us anything, it’s that the dreadful harmful online content cannot be defined by what is strictly legal. Algorithms do not differentiate between harmless and harmful content; they see a pattern and exploit it.
We have a moral duty to keep children safe on online platforms. We have a moral duty to keep other users safe as well. People of all ages need to be protected from the extremely harmful online content, particularly around suicide, self-harm and eating disorders where the lines between what is legal and illegal are so opaque.”
The responding Minister, Damian Collins, said:
“I share the sentiments expressed about the tragedy of Molly’s death, its avoidable nature and the tireless work of the Russell family, and particularly her father, Ian Russell, whom I have met several times to discuss this. The Russell family pursued a very difficult and complicated case, which required a huge release of evidence from the social media companies, particularly Instagram and Pinterest, to demonstrate the sort of content to which Molly Russell was exposed.
For a vulnerable person, the sad truth is that their vulnerability will probably be detected by the AI that drives the recommendation tools. That person is far more likely to be exposed to content that will make their vulnerabilities worse. That is how a vulnerable teenage girl can be held by the hand—by an app’s AI recommendation tools—and walked from depression to self-harm and worse. That is why regulating online safety is so important and why the protection of children is so fundamental to the Bill.”
