Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate ONLINE SAFETY BILL (Second sitting).
Paul Scully
No, not about whether climate change is happening, but we are talking about a wide range. “Provides false information”—how do the companies determine what is false? I am not talking about the binary question of whether climate change is happening, but climate change is a wide-ranging debate. “Provides false information” means that someone has to determine what is false and what is not. Basically, the amendment outsources that to the social media platforms. That is not appropriate.
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14:36 Alex Davies-Jones (Labour)
In addition to harmful health content, our amendment (a) to amendment 15 would also add to the list content that incites hateful extremism and provides false information about climate change, as we have heard. In early written evidence from Carnegie, it outlined how serious the threat of climate change disinformation is to the UK. Malicious actors spreading false information on social media could undermine collective action to combat the threats. At present, the Online Safety Bill is not designed to tackle those threats head on.
We all recognise that social media is an important source of news and information for many people, and evidence is emerging of its role in climate change disinformation. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate published a report in 2021 called “The Toxic Ten: How ten fringe publishers fuel 69% of digital climate change denial”, which explores the issue further. Further analysis of activity on Facebook around COP26 undertaken by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue demonstrates the scale of the challenge in dealing with climate change misinformation and disinformation. The research compared the levels of engagement generated by reliable, scientific organisations and climate-sceptic actors, and found that posts from the latter frequently received more traction and reach than the former, which is shocking. For example, in the fortnight in which COP26 took place, sceptic content garnered 12 times the level of engagement that authoritative sources did on the platform, and 60% of the sceptic posts analysed could be classified as actively and explicitly attacking efforts to curb climate change, which just goes to show the importance of ensuring that climate change disinformation is also included in the list in Government amendment 15.
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14:44 Kirsty Blackman (SNP)
Thank you for chairing the meeting this afternoon, Dame Angela. I agree wholeheartedly with the amendments tabled by the Labour Front-Bench team. It is important that we talk about climate change denial and what we can do to ensure people are not exposed to that harmful conspiracy theory through content. It is also important that we do what we can to ensure that pregnant women, for example, are not told not to take the covid vaccine or that parents are not told not to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps and rubella. We need to do what we can to ensure measures are in place.
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14:53 Kim Leadbeater (Labour)
I will focus primarily on an issue that is extremely important to me and to many others: extremism and radicalisation. However, while I will focus on the dangers of extremism and radicalisation, be it right-wing, Islamist, incel or other, the dangers that I am about to set out—the chain of events that leads to considerable harm online—are the same for self-harm content, eating disorder content, health disinformation, climate change disinformation or any dangerous, hateful material directed at people based on their sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion or other characteristics.
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15:01 Paul Scully
Including harmful health content as a category risks requiring companies to apply the adult user empowerment tools to an unfeasibly large volume of content—way beyond just the vaccine efficacy that was mentioned. That has implications both for regulatory burden and for freedom of expression, as it may capture important health advice. Similarly, on climate change, the Online Safety Bill itself will introduce new transparency, accountability and free speech duties and category one services. If a platform said that certain types of content are not allowed, it will be held to account for their removal.
We recognised that there was a heightened risk of disinformation surrounding the COP26 summit. The counter-disinformation unit led by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport brought together monitoring and analysis capabilities across Government to understand disinformation that posed a risk to public safety or to delegates or that represented attempts at interference from malign actors. We are clear that free debate is essential to a democracy and that the counter-disinformation unit should not infringe upon political debate. Government already work closely with the major social media platforms to encourage them to collaborate at speed to remove disinformation as per their terms of service.
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